(essays & projects)
How to Conserve a Ritual: Reconsidering the Past and Future of Performance Art
[essay/pdf]
Cheerful Meandering: On the Virtues of a
Sinuous Life
[essay/pdf]
Ideal and the Real [video & statement]
(the performance wunderkammer)
the performance wunderkammer editor: Christopher J. McRae
"Intergalactic Chicano:"" Hip Hop Cumbia Futures in a Sombrero Galaxy
[essay & audio]
"I've Never Been to Me": What Goes into a Digital Short [essay & video]
(performance & pedagogy)
"Oh no! My Mentor's a Mushroom!"
[essay/pdf]
(reviews)
book review editor: Leila Nashef
Singing Freedom into Being: Reviewing Alborz Ghandehari's Bird of Dawn: A Century of Song and Struggle in Iran
[performance review]
Biplane: Album Review and Interview with
Michael Broderick
[performance review]
Review of Performing New Orleans: Rethinking Resilience in Art and Everyday Life, by Stuart Andrews and Patrick Duggan
[book review]
Review of Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, by Vivian L. Huang
[book review]
Review of Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive, by Danielle Bainbridge
[book review]
<notes on contributors>
» Kamran Afary, PhD, RDT-BCT, is Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT), and Associate Director of the Drama Therapy Institute of Los Angeles. His scholarship bridges performance studies, drama therapy, and Iranian cultural history, with a focus on narrative, social justice, and expressive arts. He is the coauthor of Molla Nasreddin: The Making of a Modernist Trickster (1906-11) (Edinburgh University Press), co-author of Iranian Diaspora Identities: Stories and Songs (Lexington 2020), and co-editor of the special issue of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, "Performance Praxis in Carceral Spaces" (Vol. 21, No. 4).
» Boatemaa Adoawaa Han Mee Agyeman-Mensah is a GhanaianKoreanAmerican poet from Ham Lake, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in American Academy of Poets, BRINK, CALLALOO, Carolina Quarterly, Cellar Door, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, and Meridian, and has been recognized by the Adroit Journal. In 2024, she was an Ignite Rural Fellow. From 2022-25 she served as co-director of COUNTERCLOCK x PATCHWORK, an interdisciplinary poetry-film collaborative fellowship. Currently, Boatemaa is an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia - Charlottesville.
» Collin Bright is a media and cultural theorist, writer, and PhD student in the Department of Communication at The University of Utah. His research critically engages with contemporary Black aesthetics and expressions to better understand how they affirm, disrupt, and transform social relations of power.
» Michael Broderick: When not walking through old graveyards, or collecting wild edibles in the woods of greater Appalachia, I am an Associate Professor of Culture and Ecology at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley. My areas of interest include critical approaches to food and culture, narrative and storytelling, post-humanisms and new materialisms, material ecology, vibrant matter assemblages, and aesthetic and performative approaches to understand our shared social world. You can find some of my most recent work in Qualitative Inquiry, Text and Performance Quarterly and Liminalities. Please feel free to reach out: broderml@jmu.edu.
» Marco Antonio Cervantes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Mexican American Studies Program at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He researches music and Black and Brown cultural convergences. He has published in the American Quarterly, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Association of Mexican American Educators, and Liminalities: Journal of Performance Studies. He recently co-edited the book Entre el Sur y el Norte: Decolonizing Education through Critical Readings of Chicana/x/o, Mexican, and Indigenous Music. Along with his work as a scholar, he performs as hip-hop artist Mexstep and is a member of the group Third Root.
» Volker Demuth lives as a writer in Berlin, Germany. He developed a spacial and multimedia form of poems he calls RaumPoem (SpacePoem). He writes poetry, essays and novels. Demuth studied at Tuebingen and Oxford University and formerly taught as a professor for media theory. Today he lives as a freelance writer. He explores meandering in more depth in his book Mäander. Siebzehn Posts zum geschwungen Leben (Matthes & Seitz Verlag, Berlin 2023).
» Laura L. Ellingson, Ph.D., is the Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University where she teaches courses in gender studies, health communication, and qualitative methods. Ellingson is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association who uses narrative, feminist, and pragmatic approaches to study communication in healthcare and in extended/chosen families. Her passion for methodological innovation manifests through her development of crystallization as a framework for qualitative research, critical embodiment theorizing, and (with Dr. Patty Sotirin) critical materialist data engagement. She is currently writing a memoir about long-term cancer survivorship.
» David J. Eshelman just finished his twentieth year on the faculty of Arkansas Tech University, where he is department head for communication and media studies. He is founder and artistic director of the Arkansas Radio Theatre and head writer / executive producer for the ongoing series, Concealed Carrie: Diamond State Crime Fighter. In fall 2026, he will take a sabbatical to direct his historical musical, Helaine and the Little War. He posts regularly to TikTok and FaceBook Reels.
» Jules Pelta Feldman is an art historian, curator, critic, and salonnière. They received their doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. They teach in the department of History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. They were previously postdoctoral research fellow for the project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge, sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted by Bern Academy of the Arts. Pelta Feldman has also worked at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Grey Art Museum, and written criticism for publications in the US, Germany, and Switzerland. Additionally, they were director and curator of Room & Board, an artist's residency and salon in Brooklyn. Their forthcoming monograph, Charles Simonds and the Seventies, will be published by Hatje Cantz in 2027.
» Leila Nashef is a playwright, performer, and academic. She works as a lecturer at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Inverness, Scotland. Her recently concluded doctoral research, entitled 'Enacting Trauma: a creative and critical exploration of the ethical implications of staging the traumatic', focused on the experiences of spectators in contemporary British theatre which stages traumatic events or experiences.
» Pablo Ramirez, Ph.D., was an emerging scholar of queer intercultural communication studies, latine studies, performance studies, and critical fat studies. His dissertation, Learning to Love Fatboy: Embodied Reclamations of My fat Body, drew on performance methods to explore what he termed "cultures of fatness" through embodied performances of fatness at the intersections of brownness and queerness in terms of relationality. Dr. Ramirez earned his M.A. from San Francisco State University in Performance Studies and posthumously earned his doctorate from Arizona State University in Critical/Cultural Communication and Performance Studies. He was and remains a beloved community member, mentor, teacher, and friend.
» Jessica Siegel is a graduate student at Villanova University, where her work engages media archaeology, intermediality, and international relations. She holds a Master's degree in English Literature and Media Studies from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Previously, she led a transnational research consortium focused on sustainability across European universities. Her research is particularly concerned with the conditions of academic freedom and its contemporary transformations, most recently in the German context.
» Adrian I. Thompson earned a B.S. in Psychology from Santa Clara University in 2026. She plans to attain her masters in Counseling Psychology and become licensed as a Marriage & Family Therapist. She has assisted in quantitative research for Stanford University but has found the qualitative research she has done under Dr. Ellingson to be profoundly rewarding. Thompson has enjoyed song-writing, singing, and piano from a young age, and has written a number of songs. She enjoys other creative pursuits and is currently working on a fantasy novel and a screenplay.
» Nic Vigilante (they/them) is a PhD Candidate in Music & Sound Studies and Don M. Randel Fellow at Cornell University, where they are also affiliated with the Media Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies programs. They teach and publish on topics including ethnographic and digital humanities methods, queer Asian American nightlife, music and video games, and sonic violence. Nic was a member of the inaugural cohort of Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellows in 2023, and their work has been recognized with awards from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities, and the American Studies Association. Their recent and forthcoming publications can be read in Women & Music, The Oxford Handbook of Online Music Cultures, The Journal of Extreme Anthropology, and Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Sound (Routledge).
» Casey Zukosky is a musician and independent scholar, having recently graduated and received his Master's from the Department of Communication at the University of Utah.
"Sleepwalker" by Mark Neumann
Mark Neumann's photographs incorporate prefabricated HO scale figures (often used by model railroad hobbyists) into natural and constructed site-specific landscapes. The images are akin to dioramas, but created in actual places. These photographs are not a result of superimposing existing images into a compositional collage. Instead, they result from traveling to places and setting up scenes using the miniature figures, sometimes constructing props and relying on available natural light. Since the miniatures are less than one inch in size, the photographs are the only way to see the "scenes" depicted in these temporary dioramas. Read more about Mark's work on his website.
Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (issn: 1557-2935)
editor-in-chief: Michael LeVan (Vancouver, WA)
managing editor: Nicole Costantini (SCAD Atlanta)
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, "Sleepwalker" by Mark Neumann (Northern Arizona University)