Kate Elswit

Kate Elswit's work with bodies combines dance history, performance theory, and German cultural studies. Before receiving her PhD in German from the University of Cambridge, she completed an MA in European Dance Theatre Practice at Laban, and undergraduate degrees in Dance and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. As a practitioner, she has danced professionally for companies including Lucky Plush Productions, Hedwig Dances, and Compagnie Felix Ruckert, and her choreographic work has appeared in solo performances and festivals in the USA and Europe. Her current book project Watching Weimar Dance, under contract with Oxford University Press, concerns physicality and meaning-making at the intersections of dance and Weimar culture, focusing on Valeska Gert, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Jooss, Anita Berber, Mary Wigman, and the Tiller Girls. She is also interested in issues of engaged spectatorship, historical retrieval, and exile.

Her publications have received two major awards for scholarship: her TDR:The Drama Review article "'Berlin . . . Your Dance Partner is Death" won the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for the best English-language article published in dance studies in 2009, and her Modern Drama article “The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss” won the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best book or essay to explore the intersections of theatre and dance/movement between 2007-2008. Other articles have appeared in Performance Research and Art Journal, and a new essay is forthcoming in the edited collection New German Dance Studies from University of Illinois Press.

During the 2009-10 school year, she taught a seminar on "Performing Bodies" and a directed reading on "Contemporary European Performance." In 2010-11, she will offer two seminars: "Dance + Drama: Twentieth-Century German Encounters" and "Photography and Performance" (co-taught with Prof. Brendan Fay, art history). Her website is: www.kateelswit.org.