Justin Sider

Justin Sider a PhD candidate in English at Yale University and will receive his degree this December. He has recently completed his dissertation, entitled “Parting Words: Address and Exemplarity in Victorian Poetry,” which explores the relationship among poetic address, public speech, and cultural authority in Victorian poetry’s valedictions and scenes of leave-taking. He has published articles on Alfred Tennyson and John Ruskin in Victorian Poetry and Studies in English Literature.

Justin will be joining us as an IPSY postdoctoral associate and lecturer in Theater Studies in Spring 2015.

La Marr Bruce, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer in Theater and African American Studies

La Marr Jurelle Bruce has left IPSY to take a position as Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. An interdisciplinary humanities scholar, critical theorist, Afromanticist, he studies and teaches black expressive culture (especially literature and performance), critical race theory, queer theory, (pop) cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and their various intersections and combinations. Before arriving at Maryland, he earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in 2013 and remained there for an additional year as IPSY Postdoctoral Fellow.

Dr. Bruce’s budding book project, “How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness, Blackness, and Radical Creativity,” considers a cohort of twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artists who have instrumentalized “madness” for radical self-making, art-making, and world-making. His second project will generate a history and theory of joy! as depicted and manifested in black expressive cultures since the nineteenth century. Traversing literature, theater, music, sports, religiosity, and the quotidian, this project will explore the liberatory potentials of black joy and the existential perils that threaten and exploit it.

Additionally, Dr. Bruce’s work is featured in the “Black Performance” special issue of African American Review (for which he received the 2014 Joe Weixlmann Award) and forthcoming in Black Queer Studies 2.0 and TDR: The Drama Review. He has received grants and honors from the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia; the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale; the Social Science Research Council; and the Mellon Foundation.

Mary Isbell, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer in English and Theater Studies

maryisbell.net

Mary Isbell has left IPSY to become an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of First-Year Writing at the University of New Haven. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut in 2013. Her book project, “The Debut of the Amateur: Nineteenth-Century Theatricals,” theorizes how the careful maintenance of amateur status shaped theatrical culture in the long nineteenth century. She recovers the material conditions of amateur theatricals to document the widespread popularity of the practice with diverse social groups including aristocrats, middle-class families, university students, office clerks, and sailors aboard naval vessels. With Judith Hawley, Mary co-directs the international interdisciplinary network known as RAPPT (Research into Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals; rappt.org). Her work has been published in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and is forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture.

Mary has worked with students on practice-based research into the history of shipboard theatricals through a production of a nineteenth-century farce aboard US Brig Niagara and the performance of a collaboratively written rehearsal play aboard USS Constitution. She is especially energized by the ways in which digital pedagogy is making student contributions more feasible and legible. Alongside her book project, she am developing a scholarly digital edition of The Young Idea: A Naval Journal Edited on Board the H.M.S. Chesapeake in 1857, 1858 & 1859The Young Idea was an illustrated weekly newspaper edited by A.D. McArthur (a clerk aboard the Chesapeake), circulated in manuscript at sea, and published by facsimile in London in 1867. She is currently developing “The Digital Young Idea” with University of New Haven students!

Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Lecturer in Theater Studies

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in the Theater Studies Program at Yale University.  She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (IPSY) from 2011 to 2013.

Her areas of research include:  20th century  theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.

Elise Morrison, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer in Theater Studies

elise.morrison@yale.edu
Elise received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011.  Her book project, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press, looks at artists who strategically employ technologies of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance.

Elise has taught courses on this topic at Yale, Brown and as a Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, where she also worked as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction and Preceptor in Expository Writing.  She co-edited a special issue on “Digital Performance and Pedagogy” for theInternational Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media (Intellect), forthcoming in fall 2012.  At Yale she has also taught courses on Digital Media in Performance and expository writing.

As a practicing artist, Elise has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET, and, in collaboration with Molly Flynn and Michelle Carriger, created the live music-performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008).  She was a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence, RI from 2009-2011, where she taught acting, appeared in numerous productions, including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010), and developed original mixed media cabaret work.  Most recently she has developed and performed Through the Looking Glass: A Surveillance Cabaret with the support of Sleeping Weazel artist’s collective in Boston.

Joseph Roach, IPSY Principal Investigator, Sterling Professor of Theater and English

joseph.roach@yale.edu

A theater historian, stage director, and performance studies scholar, Joseph Roach is the author of The Player’s Passion:  Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), Cities of the Dead:  Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and It (2007).  He is the editor (with Janelle Reinelt) of Critical Theory and Performance (2nd edition, revised 2007) and Changing the Subject:  Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (2009).  His publications have been recognized by the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and the Joe E. Calloway Prize for Drama.  Before coming to Yale, he chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of Arts at NYU.

He is the recipient of a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funds the World Performance Project at Yale. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Warwick (UK) and the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship from the Huntington Library.

Dominika Laster

Dominika Laster, Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) and Lecturer in Theater Studies at Yale University.  IPSY Postdoctoral Associate (2011-2013).

dominika.laster@yale.edu

Dominika Laster is a native of Wrocław, Poland.  Her areas of research include:  20th century    theatre, Eastern European theatre, intercultural performance, nonwestern theatre, postcolonial studies, immigration, memory and trauma studies, abjection, and the politics of performance.  In addition to her scholarly research, Laster has worked as a director and performer in work ranging from pantomime to opera.

Dominika Laster is a recipient of the Dwight Conquergood Award from Performance Studies international for her research examining Islamic practices of witnessing within the context of post-9/11 detentions and deportations.  Laster’s doctoral dissertation, a critical analysis of key aspects of performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski’s notions and praxes associated with the work on self, earned her the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

In 2009, Laster served as the Associate Curator of Tracing Grotowski’s Path:  Year of Grotowski in New York.  Laster has published articles in Performance Research, Slavic and Eastern European Performance, New Theatre Quarterly and TDR.  Her books A Bridge Made of Memory:  Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland (Editor) are forthcoming from Seagull Press, distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press.

Elise Morrison

Elise Morrison, IPSY Postdoctoral Associate, Lecturer

moreliserose@gmail.com

Elise received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011.

Her book project, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance, Feminism, Performance, looks at artists who strategically employ technologies of surveillance to create performances and installations that pose new and different ways of interacting with and understanding apparatuses of surveillance.

Elise has taught courses on this topic as a Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University, where she also worked as the Associate Director for Speaking Instruction and Preceptor in Expository Writing.  She is co-editing a special issue on “Digital Performance and Pedagogy” for theInternational Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media (Intellect), forthcoming in fall 2012.

As a practicing artist, Elise has performed a number of surveillance art pieces on the public thoroughfares of New York, Providence and the INTERNET, and, in collaboration with Molly Flynn and Michelle Carriger, created the live music-performance events Cabaret Murderess (2007) and Mirror Stage (2008).  She was a Resident Artist at Perishable Theatre in Providence, RI from 2009-2011, where she taught acting, appeared in numerous productions, including Sweet Disaster (2008), Biography of a Constellation (2008), Anna Bella Eema (2009), and the burlesque cabaret Jingle Belles and a Few Balls (2009, 2010), and developed original mixed media cabaret work.  She is currently developing a ‘Surveillance Cabaret’ in collaboration with Sleeping Weazel artist’s collective in Boston.  Elise is thrilled to be joining the Interdisciplinary Performance Studies program at Yale!

Lynda Paul – Postdoctoral Associate in the Integrated Humanities at Yale

lynda.paul@yale.edu

Lynda Paul is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Integrated Humanities at Yale. Her work examines the intersections between multimedia and performance, with a focus on the role of sound in genres from theater and opera to film and digital media. Her current book project comprises an interdisciplinary study of the live-but-technologized music and soundscapes of the Las Vegas Strip and its Cirque du Soleil shows. More broadly, her research centers on music in theater, performance studies, media theory, and popular culture, and raises questions about aesthetics, ideologies, and representations of fantasy, history, myth, and culture as they are manifested through the act and experience of musical performance in diverse societies and historical periods. She has presented her work at national and international conferences, and recently published a review of a Balinese production of Oedipus Rex (William Maranda’s Raja Edepus), a project that drew upon her practical experience with Balinese music, dance, and drama. Beyond Bali, she is a conservatory-trained instrumentalist and vocalist, and has been an avid practitioner of theater in diverse capacities for over two decades. As a vocalist, she is an enthusiastic performer of Baroque opera, American musical theater, and classical Western song, as well as the ensemble repertoires of Bulgaria, Corsica, Georgia, and the Sacred Harp. In addition to her research and performance pursuits, Lynda holds a keen interest in teaching, especially in the areas of interdisciplinary pedagogy and academic writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Cooper, Mellon Fellow in the History of Art Department, Graduate Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art

In 2006 John Cooper graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University where he read English. In 2008 he received an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and later that year took up a Mellon Fellowship in the History of Art department at Yale. John is currently a research assistant to Joe Roach at the Yale Center for British Art for the project ‘Art and the Stage in Britain: Inigo Jones to David Hockney’.

His dissertation is entitled Imperial Balls: An Art History of Sex, War, and Dancing in India, England and the Caribbean, 1800-1850. It is a formal study of the aesthetics of movement across the worlds affected by British imperialism. It deals with nautch dancing in India, colonial ballet in England, and social dancing in the Caribbean. Treating dance performances as symbolic expressions of the social and political orders in which they take place, the dissertation examines the colonial translation of dances into images and objects for reproduction, circulation and possession. This leads to a critique of the ways British imperialism made expressions of itself in dance and dealt with the dancing of others.