Workshops & Seminars

The TAPS Graduate Workshop brings together faculty and graduate students from across the university whose research involves theater and/or performance. The workshop seeks to provide a forum for work in theater and performance studies that spans a variety of disciplines across the Humanities and Social Sciences, including anthropology, cinema and media studies, East Asian languages and cultures, English, Germanic studies, history, music, romance languages and literatures, and Slavic languages. In addition, the workshop seeks to nurture productive reflection on the longstanding divide between the theories and practices of performance.  In any given quarter, the workshop serves as a forum for graduate student dissertation chapters in progress, artists who are presenting work in progress, and professors from UChicago and beyond presenting current research.

Spring 2024 schedule:

“Hauntological Somatics"**
Monika Blaszczak, PhD Candidate, Performance Studies, NYU
Friday, April 26th, 4:30-6pm (TBA)

“Transindividual Ecology: Marwa Arsanios and Naomi RIncón Gallardo"
Jessica Zi Chen, MFA/PhD Student, MA/PhD, SAIC
Tuesday, May 7th, 4:30-6pm (TBA)

"Alan Lomax Archive: 20th Century Sonic Landscapes, Poetic, and Oral Traditions"
Lizzy Lewis, MFA/PhD Student, Performance and Performance Studies, Brown University (Trinity Repertory)
Tuesday, May 14th, 4:30-6pm (Zoom)

“Bel Canto and Vals Criollo: Orchestrating the 1996-97 Lima Hostage Crisis”
Catrin Dowd, PhD Student, Music/TAPS, UChicago
Tuesday, May 28th, 4:30-6pm (TBA)

* Please note the special date for the dance workshop with Monika Błaszczak (Ph.D., NYU).

** This workshop will involve participatory dance activities. Further specifics will be provided for registrants. Please be prepared to participate; no experience is required, and all levels of experience with movement are welcome.

Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Jamie Lee (jamielee92@uchicago.edu) and Jennifer Williams (jhw26@uchicago.edu). We look forward to seeing you all there!

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 Sound and Society 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.