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(essays & projects)
Liminality and Performance in African Masquerades
[essay/pdf]
The Sway or the Shudder? Hegel and Adorno on the Philosophical Status of Dance
[essay/pdf]
Rethinking Dance as Critical Praxis through Affect Theory: Choreography, Movement, Body, and Affect [essay/pdf]
Designing for Dread: Cold War Bomb Shelters and the Aesthetics of Domestic Survival
[essay/pdf]
The Memory Thief: Aging, the Feminine, and Relationship in Surreal Poetry and Programmatic Piano Composition [essay & video]
(the performance wunderkammer)
the performance wunderkammer editor: Christopher J. McRae
PUGNA. A Video Essay on Digital Gestures
[video]
1000 Cuts: A Performance Studies Curriculum
a. 1000 Cuts: A Performance Studies Curriculum [video]
b. 1000 Cuts: Artists' Statement [essay/html ]
c. The Body Holds us Accountable [response essay/pdf ]
Boy Heroic: When the Wound Becomes Form
[poetry/essay/pdf]
(the city)
the city editor: Stuart Andrews
Prefigurative Performance: A Music School
in Oaxaca as a Liminal Enclave
[essay/pdf]
(aftermaths)
aftermaths editors: Mary Elizabeth Anderson & Richard Haley
Vertical Jam / Temple of Disheveled Archives
[mixed form/html]
"Dance is Omnipresent, Once it is Shared." Writing with, alongside, and in response to four recent encounters with dance ephemera
[essay/pdf]
(book review)
book review editor: Leila Nashef
Review of Performance Art in Ireland: A History, edited by Aine Phillips
[html]
<notes on contributors>
» Elizabeth Brewer Redwine is the author of Gender, Performance and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre (Oxford UP 2021) and Sara Allgood's Memories: Untold Stories of the Abbey Theatre and Early Hollywood (Oxford UP 2025) and co-editor, with Amrita Ghosh, of Yeats and Tagore: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning (Brill 2022). She teaches as a Senior Lecturer at Seton Hall University in the English Department and runs the first year Core course.
» Wesley Brunson received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto in May 2024. His research and writing explore intimacy, fieldwork, and form, and his recent work integrates poetic and ethnographic modes. He has taken creative writing classes at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently working at the intersection of public scholarship and narrative form.
» Sandra L. Faulkner is Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University and writes, teaches, and researches about close relationships. Faulkner founded the Dialogue and Relationship Research Lab at BGSU and is the current Editor-in-Chief of Communication Studies. Faulkner lives in NW Ohio with their partner, a fierce teen, a 1968 Kawai baby grand, and two rescue mutts.
» Michaela Frischherz (she/her) is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Towson University. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and holds a M.A. in Cultural Analysis from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Michaela specializes in cultural and rhetorical criticism with an emphasis on queer feminist ways of knowing. Guided by an ethic of pleasure activism, her research focuses on the meaning-making practices forged by women and other historically disenfranchised genders communicating pleasure under the duress of the relations of power. Michaela teaches rhetorical theory and criticism, sexual communication, research methods, queer/lgbt communication studies, and a study abroad experience on the concept of social permissiveness in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
» Janna Jones is a professor of communication at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of both books and essays that make sense of twentieth century art, interior design, architecture and cinema. Her article “Making Room for The Brady Bunch: the Syndication of Suburban Discomfort” was published in Liminalities 15.1 in 2019. She is currently researching and writing about (and collaborating with) Wendy Clarke, one of the most important video artists of the twentieth century.
» Antonio Moya-Latorre is a postdoctoral researcher at INGENIO, a joint nstitute of the Universitat Politècnica de València and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He also lectures in the Master's in International Development at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, where he teaches sustainable development in Latin America. Dr. Moya-Latorre holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and a Master's in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT. His research explores how community-driven cultural processes in urban peripheries enhance social and material conditions in cities.
» Desirée Rowe received their interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She is currently a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Towson University. Desirée's research digs into the tangible embodied interactions of our cruel fantasies of life. Through queer performance ethnography, arts-based methods, and critical qualitative interventions her investigations center on negativity in two ways. First, through reparative negativity (a la Sedgwick) that allows space for re-framing and revisioning institutions and institutional life. Second, through embracing a contradictory negativity, one that is an unruly anti-productive or unwell negativity. She has published articles in Women and Language, Text and Performance Quarterly, Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, Rethinking History: A Journal of Theory and Practice, Qualitative Inquiry, Western Journal of Communication Studies, and many book chapters. In 2019 she was named a Fulbright Scholar to Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. She currently serves as the associate editor of the Performance Space in Text and Performance Quarterly.
» Evan Supple is a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School, under the supervision of Frank Ruda. His research focuses on Hegel's complicated rela-tionship to dance, as it pertains to both aesthetics and speculative philosophy. He holds a Master's in Interdisciplinary Studies from Athabasca University. Additionally, Evan serves as the associate artistic director of Staatstheater Nürnberg Ballet of Difference.
» Michael Tristano Jr. (he/him) is assistant professor and director of cultural studies at Towson University. A performance ethnographer, his work is at the intersection of performance studies, queer studies, and critical/cultural communication studies. Michael's research focuses on the material conditions of queer and trans people of color and the means by which queer and trans communities of color engage in worldmaking practices and perform joy in light of oppressive conditions. Michael labors and lives on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples. He is currently an associate editor of Text & Performance Quarterly. His recent work can be found in QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Women's Studies in Communication, Sexualities, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, and Text & Performance Quarterly. Michael unequivocally supports the Palestinian Liberation movement and stands in solidarity with all who resist, refuse, and rebel against the genocide of the Palestinian people. He calls upon all of us to halt the gears of empire.
» Antonio M. Villalba is a final-year Ph.D. candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he conducts practice-based research within the CINEMA group. He works in the Research Department at TAI School of the Arts in Madrid, where he also teaches as a full-time faculty member. His research focuses on actor direction for cinema, combining artistic practice with theoretical inquiry. Alongside his academic work, he develops projects as a film director and producer.
» Walter E.A. van Beek is a Dutch cultural anthropologist with a long career behind him. After working at Utrecht University, he became a professor of religious anthropology at Tilburg University. Now emeritus, he is a senior researcher at the Centre for African Studies at Leiden University. He has conducted extensive field research among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and north-eastern Nigeria, as well as among the Dogon of Mali. He has published extensively on both groups. One of his recent projects involves recording and preserving the cultural heritage of the Dogon, with a particular focus on interpreting a major song cycle, which has resulted in three monographs. Another project was undertaken with a colleague from the world of ethnographic museums, on African masks, resulting in Masquerades in African Society: Gender, Power, and Identity (Oxford: Currey, 2023). The article in this issue is a follow-up on that book.
» Debra Vidali is a poet, multimodal ethnographer, essayist, and theater-maker. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, and directs the Anthropology Theater Lab. Vidali grew up on the Rust Belt of Western New York State, where her great grandfather started a scrapyard business to recycle dented metal and soiled paper. Her work has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, Seismograf, The Creative Ethnographer's Notebook, Cultural Anthropology, Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, and exhibitions and performances in Paris, London, Malmö, Washington DC, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Other work might be found on Debra's blog, new york fragments.
» Şengül Yıldız-Alanbay is an Instructor in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (AS-PECT) doctoral program at Virginia Tech. Her research lies at the intersection of critical political theory, international relations, social theory, cultural studies, aesthetics, and critical dance and performance studies. Her essays have been published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, New Political Science, SPECTRA (Virginia Tech Publishing), and Dance Research Journal. She also served as a guest editor for SPECTRA and as a reviewer for SPECTRA, Global Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (issn: 1557-2935)
editor-in-chief: Michael LeVan (Vancouver, WA)
managing editor: vacant
aftermaths editors: Mary Elizabeth Anderson & Richard Haley (San Jose State University)
the city editor: Stuart Andrews (Brunel Univesity of London)
performance & pedagogy editor: vacant
the performance wunderkammer editor: Christopher J. McRae (University of South Florida)
book review editor: Leila Nashef (University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness)
banner/issue image, "Needles" by Michael LeVan