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.

This workshop will be held entirely online the 2020-21 academic year. Though we mourn the loss of the shared physical space and opportunities for more casual conversation, we have chosen to run the workshop online to ensure the physical wellbeing of our workshop members. We are working hard to offer programming that includes some time for socializing and community-building, as well as some exciting opportunities to engage with live performances and rehearsals (both live-streamed and intended to be experienced solo and online).

Winter 2021 schedule

Generally speaking, we will meet every other Wednesday from 12p -1:30p CT. We will kindly ask people to register in advance of the workshops in order to receive the Zoom link (for security reasons). Sessions marked with an asterisk occur outside of our regular meeting time.

1/13/20 –12:oo-1:30pm CT– "Dialectics of Revision in Performance Historiography and Dramatic Adaptation"- İlyas Deniz Çınar and Şeyda Nur Yıldırım, Graduate Students in Communication Studies, Kadir Has University Istanbul. Respondent: Asya Sagnak, MA Student in TAPS, University of Chicago.

1/27/20 –12:oo-1:30pm CT– “Beneath this Flag Stands a Body: On the Human Form as Final Technology”- Anna Jayne Kimmel, PhD Student in Performance Studies, Stanford University. Respondent: Clara Nizard, PhD Student in English/TAPS, University of Chicago.

* 2/17/20 –5:00-6:30pm CT– “A Cultural History of Process-oriented Drama and Pedagogy in post-Civil War Evanston”- Fiona Maxwell, PhD Candidate in History, University of Chicago. Respondent: TBA
Co-sponsored with the 18/19th C Workshop. 

2/24/20 –12:oo-1:30pm CT– “The Aestheticization of Plantlife in the Museum Space”- Cati Kalinoski, MA in Performance Studies, New York University. Respondent: TBA

2/23/21 - 10:00-11:00am CT - Scott Sheppard on Dramaturgy and Devised Process in Underground Railroad Game

Scott Sheppard, co-deviser of Underground Railroad Game and company member of Lighting Rod Special, will be talking about the dramaturgical, devising, and research process of building Underground Railroad Game. The script will be circulated only to folks who preregister for this workshop session. Undergraduate students from the Genre Fundamentals course will be joining us as well! REGISTER HERE.

3/10/21 - 12:00 - 1:30 pm CT - "Making Melodrama Great Again" - Christopher Corbo, PhD Candidate in English, Rutgers University. Respondent: John Muse, Associate Professor, English and Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago. Registration link coming in March!

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.