Workshops & Seminars

The TAPS Graduate Workshop brings together faculty and graduate students from across the university whose research involves performance. We seek to provide a forum for work that spans a variety of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, cinema and media studies, East Asian languages and cultures, English, comparative literature, Germanic studies, history, music, romance languages and literatures, and more. In addition, the workshop seeks to put pressure on the long-standing divide between the theories and practices of performance. In any given quarter, the workshop serves as a forum for research across institutions and borders, for graduate student theses/dissertation chapters in progress, and for inquiry into pedagogical form.

The workshop typically meets on alternating Wednesdays throughout the academic year.  For more information about the workshop and its current schedule of events, please visit the TAPS Graduate Workshop website or contact workshop coordinators Asya Sagnak and Aydan Shahdadpuri.

Call for Proposals

UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies Workshop seeks project proposals for the 2024-2025 academic year. We are soliciting ongoing work from graduate students and faculty including scholarly writing, performances, and conference-style talks. While the workshop will be held in-person, we also strongly encourage contributors from beyond the University of Chicago to participate via Zoom.

We welcome proposals on theater and performance broadly. This year, we are particularly excited about proposals at the intersection of affect, embodiment, queer/trans performance, and political performance. Specific (though certainly non-exhaustive!) areas of interest include: anticolonial performance, performance beyond the human, performance and the environment, performance and carcerality, protest as performance, premodern performance, and practice-based research experiments.

The Workshop aims to foster a community of colleagues and practitioners within and beyond the walls of UChicago. It is a time for close reading and close conversation—an opportunity to exchange good-faith feedback for work at any stage of production and across media and writing genres. We are eager to talk across methods and welcome joint presenter-respondent submissions. Papers can be any length but should typically not exceed 30 pages. Performances can be any length but should typically not exceed 45 minutes. At this stage, proposals need only include the following:

• Provisional title and brief personal bio
• Project type (paper, performance, etc)
• Short description of content and/or argument; if applicable, abstract
• Preferred presentation date (Fall, Winter, or Spring quarters)
• Preferred presentation format (on campus or over Zoom)
• Any special technology, space, or materials requests

This year, the Workshop intends to meet biweekly on alternating Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Please email your proposals to workshop coordinators Asya Sagnak (asyas@uchicago.edu) and Aydan Shahdadpuri (aydan@uchicago.edu) by Wednesday, October 2nd with subject line “TAPS Workshop Proposal.” Should you have any questions or accessibility concerns, please do not hesitate to email us. For announcements from the TAPS workshop, please visit our website. To stay in touch with our workshop, please subscribe to our list-serv.

The Movement Theory Reading Group is an informal meeting for faculty and graduate students interested in dance and movement studies. The reading group meets monthly; readings are chosen on the basis of participant interest. Readings and discussions intersect a broad range of fields, including dance history, performance studies, aesthetic theory, cultural studies, art history, disability studies, political theory, the history of science and medicine, and the study of race, ethnicity and indigeneity.

The 20th and 21st Century Workshop (C20/21) provides a space for graduate students and faculty members across the humanities to present and discuss work in progress that engages aesthetic and cultural objects produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as their associated contexts, reception, and theoretical problems.  Although the workshop is open to a variety of disciplinary approaches, it is primarily organized around conceptual questions specific to this historical period, including: the instability of categories like “high” and “low” culture, modernism’s lives and afterlives, the effects of changing media technologies, and 20th/21st century histories of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality.

The Music and Sound Workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students, faculty, and other scholars to explore how sound mediates, intensifies, and undermines the relationships between people. As an antidote to visual-centric scholarship, the Sound and Society Workshop aims to foster scholarly conversations about the complex roles played by sound. It can function as a vehicle for pleasure (like an orchestra performing a Beethoven symphony), but it can also signify resistance (like the collective chant of protest), violence (like the oppressive propaganda transmitted over radios of Nazi Germany), or sanctuary (like the noise‐blocking aspirations of headphone culture). Either way, sound denotes power, and as a workshop, we work to understand the manifold ways that music and sound are deeply intertwined with history, people, and society.

Sponsored by the Department of Music and supported by the University of Chicago Council on Advanced Studies, EthNoise! is an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students, faculty, and guests to share and discuss ongoing research projects. Our mission is to foster dialogue about recent research at the intersection of music, language, and culture. While music is the thread uniting all of the workshop’s presentations, our speakers come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including ethno/musicology, history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and more. Our participants also draw on a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnography and archival analysis.