This working group brings together faculty and graduate students from SAS and Mason Gross School of the Arts to explore several nodes of shared interest. Multiple humanities disciplines have begun to explore performance studies methodologies as they consider the destabilizing potentiality of performance (what musicologist Carolyn Abbate calls the “drastic” quality of performance). The proposed working group will focus on the following topics:
- Practice-based research between performers and cultural analysts and historians.
- Cross-cultural exploration of performance and text globally
- Non-textual epistemologies (orature)
- The archive and its relationship to performance
- The supposed ephemerality of performance—following the work of Rebecca Schneider, what might “remain”?
By drawing together faculty from SAS and Mason Gross we will foster vibrant cross-disciplinary collaborations and promote interdisciplinary dialogue, creating opportunities for humanists to “think through performance” with their colleagues in the arts. We aim to hold at least two colloquium talks with invited speakers as well as workshops that bring performers and scholars together for practice-based research events where we use performance as a method of knowledge creation and analysis.
Organizers
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Amanda Eubanks Winkler
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Amanda Eubanks Winkler is Director of the Department of Music and a professor of musicology. Her research focuses on English music and theater. She was a long-term NEH fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2001–2002) and served as the Co-Investigator on Performing Restoration Shakespeare, a project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK (2017-2020). Eubanks Winkler has also engaged with performance studies and practice-based research, including workshops that staged excerpts of William Davenant’s Macbeth and Charles Gildon’s Measure for Measure (Folger Theatre, Washington, D.C.) and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, VA). As part of the Performing Restoration Shakespeare project, she served as music director for a workshop of the Restoration-era Tempest (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London) and she co-led a workshop for scholars and served as a consultant for a full professional production of Davenant’s Macbeth, staged at the Folger Theatre, Washington DC in 2018. She has also worked with professional early music groups, including ARTEK, La Risonanza, Ensemble Leviathan, NYS Baroque, and the Henry Purcell Society of Boston.
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Henry Turner
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Henry S. Turner is Professor of English and Vice President for Academic Initiatives at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He specializes in Renaissance literature and intellectual history, especially drama, philosophy, and the history of science. He is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), Shakespeare’s Double Helix (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2008), and The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516-1651 (Chicago, 2016). His articles, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Annals of Science, Configurations, differences, ELH, Isis, JEMCS, Nano, postmedieval, Public Books, Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, South Central Review, and The Spenser Review, as well as in a wide range of edited collections. He is currently co-writing a book with Jane Hwang Degenhardt (U-Mass, Amherst) tentatively entitled The Shakespearean Horizon: Worlds Upon Worlds in The Renaissance and Today. His is work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and by a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
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Nancy Yunhwa Rao
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- Board of Governors Professor of Music, Department of Music, Mason Gross School of the Arts
Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nancy Yunhwa Rao has produced award-winning research on a range of topics, including gender and music, sketch studies, music modernism, cultural fusion in music, racial representations, and the music history of early Chinese Americans. Her publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship.