Share

Theater and Performance Studies at Dartmouth College

The Department of Theater seeks to integrate the intellectual and creative legacies of our discipline. In addition to our practical courses in performance and production, we offer a rich array of courses in theater studies: the study of theater history, dramatic criticism, and theory. We also embrace the discipline of performance studies, an interdisciplinary field that broadens theories of performance beyond conventional understandings of theater. Performance studies scholars explore how theatricality pervades our public and private lives as well as the role of performance and performativity in the production of social and political identities. Rituals, memorial ceremonies, installations, political speeches, and viral YouTube videos are just a few examples of what we teach, analyze, and write about as performance.  

  • The 2019 special issue of Women and Performance, coedited by Junior Fellow Lakshmi Padmanabhan at the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and featuring work by Kelly Chung, Dean’s Postdoctorate Fellow in Asian American Studies.

  • Analola Santana’s book (University of Michigan Press, 2019) examines the continuing effects of colonialism on modern Latin American identities, with a particular focus on the way it has constructed the body of the other through performance.

  • Laura Edmondson’s book (Indiana University Press, 2018) explores cultural production of trauma and war in and from northern Uganda, postgenocide Rwanda, and the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In addition to taking courses from the department’s core faculty scholars, Laura Edmondson and Monica White Ndounou, as well as visiting professor Woon-Ping Chin, our students benefit from the presence of several theater and performance studies scholars across campus. Several of these courses can be used to fulfill requirements of the theater major, please consult the ORC for details.

Key faculty of theater and performance studies at Dartmouth College include:

Woon-Ping Chin, Visiting Professor of Theater
Specialization:  East Asian performance

Kelly Chung, Research Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies
Specializations: Asian American, feminist, and queer of color performance, Marxist aesthetic criticism, and visual culture

Laura Edmondson, Associate Professor, Department of Theater
Specializations:  East and Central African performance; transnationality and state violence

Summer Kim Lee, Mellon Faculty Fellow in English and Creative Writing
Specializations:  Asian American performance, feminist and queer aesthetics

Eng-Beng Lim, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Specializations: queer/transnational studies; Asian/American performance

Eman Morsi, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies
Specializations: post 1940s theatre in Cuba and Egypt

Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Society of Fellows and Department of Film and Media Studies
Specializations: Anti-colonial and postcolonial theory, queer and feminist aesthetics, South Asian performance and visual culture

Scott Sanders, Assistant Professor of French and Italian
Specialization: French theater

Analola Santana, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese:
Specialization:  Latin American contemporary theater and performance

Victoria Somoff, Associate Professor of Russian
Specialization:  Russian theater and performance; Stanislavsky