Rebecca Schneider writes on media, performance, and the porous borders of the so-called "live." 

I am currently working on two forthcoming books. The first, hopefully nearing completion, concerns gesture and will appear as a digital book. It is supported by a Mellon grant for the Digital Humanities at Brown.  Another book, also underway, is to be titled Shoaling in the Sea of History. This book is on littoral dance in the afterlives of slavery's capitalisim and is supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

In the past, I have written extensively on theatre and performance practices that stretch accepted borders around media. My first book engaged with artists who use their own bodies as the stage for their performances, situating them within theatre and art historical traditions of the "avant-garde" and reading their work relative to feminist and race critical theory. Since that book, I have written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative."

My second book, titled Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, focused on practices in visual and performance art that labor under the rubric "reenactment." In it, I explore the wide range of both live and mediated performance — mostly in performance art, theatre, and photography — that attempts to "step into time" and duplicate or even "touch" prior historical acts and events. For this book, I studied Civil War reenactments and the passionate investments of those who engage in reenactment. I compared the activities of "living history" with related practices of temporal travel in the frames of visual art and theatre (and their intermedial cousins). I contend that in much museum and pedagocial practice, the site of authenticity has shifted off of the historical object and onto the very vexed category of "experience" in relationship to historical knowledge. So, too, has the site in experimental art been shifting for many years off of the art object understood as discrete, and onto engagement with its display and its circulation vis a vis the "experience" of the art participant. It is these shifts, their problems and promises, that that book explores and engages.

My third and fourth books were both short. The third, Theatre & History, is intended as an introduction to the overlap of these disciplines. It is a short book intended for undergratuates. A fourth short book, Remain,  was co-written with Jussi Parikka with an introduction by Joana Jucan. This book teases apart the ksyword "remain"  media studies and performance studies. My portion of the book is titled "Slough Media" and takes up the production of obsolescence in relationship to the live body among other media forms.

I have over fifty essays in journals and anthologies. Some of my essays are available to download here.

I am a co-principal investigator for a Mellon Grant awarded to Brown University, Stanford University and Northwestern University titled "Dance Studies In/And the Humanities," for $2,000,000, 2012-2018.

See fuller list on CV.  SELECTIONS: 

Schneider, Rebecca. Theatre and History.  Palgrave, 2014.

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, 2011.

Schneider, Rebecca. "Solo Solo Solo." In After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, edited by Gavin Butt. Blackwell, 2001.

Schneider, Rebecca. Re:Direction. A Theoretical and Practical Guide, co-edited with Gabrielle Cody. Worlds of Performance Series.  Routledge, 2001.

Schneider, Rebecca. "Hello Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre." In Performance and Psychoanalysis, edited by Adrian Kear and Patrick Campbell.  Routledge, 2001.

Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance.  Routledge, 1997.

The Oscar Brockett Prize for Best Essay, American Society for Theatre Research, for "That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up" in Theatre Journal 2018.

co-PI on Mellon grant "Dance Studies In/And the Humanities," 2012-18.

Other information available in Curriculum Vita

Having recently moved to Modern Culture and Media, new courses are under construction. The courses that appear from previous years through Banner in TAPS are now obsolete for my roster. Stay tuned for new and exciting directions!