Current Students

Olateju Adesida

Adekemi Adeyemi

Derek Barton

Research: marionette performance in the Czech Republic and Germany

Lisa Biggs

Ashley Black

Research Interests: critical actor and performer technique and training, the role of representation and and rehearsal in agentive subjectivity formation processes, American/African American popular television history.

Andrew James Brown

Research: queer memory practices in diaspora, genocide, and refugee conditions; re-emergence and resilencing in commemoration, musealization, and monument building.
Performance: exploring the line of appropriation in theories of epic memory and the ability to remember what belongs to another time, space, and identity.

Hilary Cooperman

Esailama G. A. Diouf

Performativity of authenticity, identity, and nationhood through West African dance.
Research traces Senegalese, Malian, Liberian and Guinean dance practices which moved from the village to the stage during the post-independence, post colonial national dance company era of the 1960's and the subsequent emergence of danced practices and the development of West African Dance companies in the United States since the 1970's.

Victoria Fortuna

Research interests include: contemporary Latin/o dance performance, performance-based engagements with state violence, and dance archival practices. Victoria's dissertation will focus on the relationship between Buenos Aires-based contemporary dance and politics from the 1960s to the present, with specific attention to dance practice as a site for negotiating and transmitting cultural memory.

Habib Iddrisu

The Price of Adaptation: Hybridization of African Music and Dance from Village to International Stage.

Javon Johnson

Javon’s dissertation focuses on community negotiation and the performance of race, gender, sexuality, and class in slam and spoken word poetry venues in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. General interests include: Pop culture, Black masculinity, 20th Century Black literature, and identity politics & performance.

Chloe Johnston

Research interests: performance art, interventionism, public art, literary adaptation for performance.

Barnaby King

Barnaby is a performer, teacher, and director who studies clowning as a set of transformative social practices in South America, and especially Colombia. He particularly engages with issues of play, boundary transgression, symbolic inversion, political subversion, humor, and the carnivalesque, as these pertain to clowning and other kinds of comic, improvisational, and political performance.

Kareem Khubchandani

Kareem is interested in the experiences of queer South Asians in the diaspora, and the ways in which they use public culture (specifically Bollywood Dance) to perform socio-political identities.

Elias Krell

Mario LaMothe

Mario’s dissertation examines how Haitian creative practitioners in France, the United States, and Haiti re-interpret tenets of their country's folklore to mediate challenges to their own sense of place and identity generated by Haitian forms of transnationalism.

Greg Mitchell

Research interests: gay tourism, sexual economies, Brazil, performance of racialized masculinities in everyday life.

Sage Morgan-Hubbard

Sage is interested in collective youth (ages 13-25) engagement and performances of Hip Hop culture (spoken word, graffiti, music videos, etc.) throughout the Pacific Island Diaspora. Her larger research interests include Ethnomusicology, Visual and Cultural Studies, Feminism/ Womanism/ Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Africana Studies, Critical Race and Post-Colonial Theory. She is a poet, educator, artist, and activist.

Mbongeni Mtshali

Mbongeni’s work focuses on questions of identity vis-a-vis an ethics of embodied enactment, and how such performances of identity might be constituted by or be constitutive of (and alternately, how they might disrupt or be disrupted by) the problematic ways in which various forms of "community" are imagined and inscribed in post-apartheid/colonial/imperial contexts."

Coya Paz

Research: lynching, American identities, Latino/a history. Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Luna, Chicago.

Pavithra Prasad

Pavithra’s dissertation focuses on subcultural musical performances in tourist Goa. Her research functions at the intersection of postcolonial theory, the study of globalization and travel, and alternative modes of popular performance in India.

Munjulika Rahman

Research: performances that draw from Indian dance traditions and western dance forms, and jatra, a form of folk drama of Bangladesh that combines acting, songs, music, and dance

Priscilla Renta

Research: Afro-Latin performance practices in a global context.

Chris Van Houten

Research: state-sanctioned violence and grassroots resistance; postcolonial performance; community-based theatre

Nikki Yeboah