Professor of Modern Culture and Media

Overview

Rebecca Schneider, Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, teaches performance studies, decolonial methods in media and live arts, prehistories of the screen, and theories of intermedia.  Engaging with Black Feminist Thought and cognates in Indigenous and postcolonial studies, she is the author of "This Shoal Which is Not One: Island Studies, Performance Studies, and Africans Who Fly" (2020) and the award-winning essay "That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in Times of Hand Up" in Theatre Journal.   She has essays forthcoming in 2023 and 2024 on Ulrike Rosenback and Vallie Export. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.

Schneider is author of four books: The Explicit Body in Performance (1997); Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reproduction (Notable Book Award ATHE 2011); Theatre and History (2014): and Remain (with Parikka and Jucan 2018, featuring her long-form essay "Slough Media").  

As a consortium editor for TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies, Schneider has edited three special issues on Precarity and Performance (2012), on New Materialisms and Performance (2015), and on Performance and Social Reproduction (2018). Another is in the works on Possession and Automation and another, with madison moore, on queer nightlife. She has published over 50 essays on media and performance in Representations, TDR, Women and Performance,  Performance Research as well as in many anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out,  Performance and Cultural Politics, Performance Cosmologies, Performance and the City, and her favorite -- the essay "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism. She has also coedited the anthologies Futures of Dance Studies and  Re:Direction and has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin, and delivered lectures at the Guggenheim in New York, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw,  Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, the Centre de la Dance in Paris, and the Point Art Center in Cyprus as well as at universities around the world. She served as a Distinguished Professor at Queen Mary University of London and a Mercator Fellow in Film Studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt among other affiliations. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, thw Guggenheim Foundation, and the Cogut and Pembroke Centers at Brown. She is currently working on two projects: a digital book on gesture across mecia to be titled Standing Still Moving, and book on littoral dance in the afterlives of slavery's capitalislm to be titled Shoaling in the Sea of HistoryWatch a lecture on the project here.  

Brown Affiliations

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