Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2pzkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-25T21:30:29.370Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Dance Studies in the International Academy: Genealogy of a Disciplinary Formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

Jens Richard Giersdorf
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

For the past thirteen years, I have been traveling to the United States from my home country of Germany, first as a graduate student in California and later as a professor living in New York. Every time I pass through immigration, I am asked a series of questions regarding my final destination and my occupation. The latter always leads to some confusion, because when I am asked what I do, my accent seems to turn “dance history” into “dentistry.” Forced by phonetics to use the term “dance studies,” when confronted by the blank face of the customs officer, I inevitably embark on an explanation of what “dance studies” might be. Just in the moment when I finally see some comprehension of my profession lighting up the officer's face, the question is asked: “And we pay you to do this?”

I constantly find myself in the position of having to explain my work. Usually I avoid a long-winded, defensive justification by comparing dance studies to one of its neighboring disciplines: “It is like art history, just writing about dance instead of paintings.” That usually does the trick, but it leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I know that dance studies isn't like art history and I certainly don't want it to be.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Summer 2009 , pp. 23 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2009

References

Works Cited

Adshead, Janet. 1981. The Study of Dance. London: Dance Books.Google Scholar
Adshead, Janet, ed. 1988. Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice. London: Dance Books.Google Scholar
Adshead, Janet. 1991. BA(Hons) Dance in Society—Course Document. Record of the Leverhulme Trust Project 1982–1988. Unpublished internal document.Google Scholar
Adshead-Lansdale, Janet. 2006. “Doctoral Research in Cultural Change.” In Shifting Sands: Dance in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Burridge, Stephanie, 159–64. Braddon, ACT: Australian Dance Council.Google Scholar
Adshead-Lansdale, Janet, and Layson, June, eds. 1983. Dance History: An Introduction. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Barthel, Gitta, and Artus, Hans-Gerd. 2007. Vom Tanz zur Choreographie: Gestaltungsprozesse in der Tanzpädagogik. Oberhausen: Athena Verlag.Google Scholar
Baxmann, Inge, and Cramer, Franz Anton, eds. 2005. Deutungsräume: Bewegungswissen als kulturelles Archiv. München: K. Kieser Verlag.Google Scholar
Berry, Joe. 2005. Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the University Works. Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Brandstetter, Gabriele, and Klein, Gabriele, eds. 2007. Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Buckland, Theresa J. 1999. Dance in the Fields: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Carter, Alexandra, ed. 1998. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Daly, Ann. 1995. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Desai, Jigna. 2004. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Desmond, Jane C., ed. 1997. Meaning in Motion. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Dills, Ann, and Albright, Ann Cooper, eds. 2001. Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1991. “Proposal for a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory at UCR.” University of California, internal document.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. 1995. Choreographing History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. 1996. Corporealities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1998. Choreography and Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Rabinow, Paul, 76–100. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Franko, Mark. 2002. The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Claudia. 2003. Liebe Hanya: Mary Wigman's Letters to Hanya Holm. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Hagood, Thomas K. 2000. A History of Dance in American Higher Education. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Shannon. 2004. Professing Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 2005. Der Streit der Fakultäten. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Translated by Mary A. Gregor as The Conflict of the Faculties (New York: Abaris Books, 1979).Google Scholar
Lansdale, Janet. 2006. ‘A Response to Susan Manning.” SDHS Newsletter 26 (1): 2–4.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan. 2006. “Letter from the President” SDHS Newsletter 26 (2): 1–2.Google Scholar
Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McCance, Dawne. 2004. Medusa's Ear: University Foundings from Kant to Chora L. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
McFee, Graham. 1992. Understanding Dance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
McFee, Graham. 1999. Dance Education and Philosophy. Aachen: Meyer and Meyer Sports.Google Scholar
Münz, Rudolf. 1989. “Theatralität und Theater. Konzeptionelle Erwägungen zum Forschungsprojekt “Theatergeschichte.” Wissenschaftliche Beiträge der Theaterhochschule “Hans Otto” 1: 5–20.Google Scholar
Petermann, Kurt. 1980. “Aufgaben und Möglichkeiten der Tanzwissenschaft in der DDR.” Material zum Theater 125: 49–65.Google Scholar
Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Ross, Janice. 2000. Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Schiller, Friedrich. 2000. Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen. Ditzingen: Reclam. Edited and translated by Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby, L. A. as On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, edited by Taylor, Diana and Villegas, Juan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Tomko, Linda. 1999. Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
von Kleist, Heinrich. 1982. “On the Marionnette Theater.” in German Romantic Criticism, edited by Willson, A. Leslie. New York: Continnum. Originally published in Heinrich von Kleist, Der Zweikampf Die heilige Cacilie, Samtliche Anekdoten, Uber das Marionettentheater (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984).Google Scholar
Winkler, Eva, and Jarchow, Peter. 1996. Neuer Künstlerischer Tanz. Dresden: Tanzwissenschaft e.V. and Palucca Schule Dresden.Google Scholar