Critical University Studies and Performance - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0826500331 ISBN 13: 9780826500335

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Critical University Studies and Performance explores how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theater and performance studies programs. In what ways might the fields of theater, performance, and dance studies, as they operate in institutions of higher education, support hegemonic logics as well as model reparative practices, given their perhaps unique disciplinary relationships to staging representation and their shared emphasis on embodiment as a practical and theoretical area of engagement?

Montez and Nereson bring together scholars with a diverse range of career experiences and embodied positions inside of higher learning in order to deepen the field’s theoretical inquiry using an ethnic studies framework. By participating in the interdisciplinary discourse of critical university studies, the volume aims to explore how to conduct ethical research that critiques the university while remaining mindful of our always contingent place within it. The contributors examine the ways that the university commodifies minoritarian knowledge, tokenizes the arts, and reproduces inequality. This book offers strategic ways to build liberatory communities and revolutionary networks among students and faculty alike in order to envision futures within and beyond the academy.

About this title

About the Author

Noe Montez is an associate professor of theater at Emory University. He is the author of Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina and co-editor of Nothing to Do with Love: and Other Plays by Santiago Loza and The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance. He is the former editor of Theatre Topics.

Ariel Nereson is an associate professor of dance studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of the award-winning book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. She is the editor of Theatre Journal as well as a practicing choreographer and dramaturg.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0826500331
• ISBN 13: 9780826500335
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Montez Noe, Nereson Ariel