Theater, Dance & Performance Studies

Project: "Encumbrances: The Infrastructural Politics of Performance"
Counterpart: Wendy Brown, Political Science

Professor Catherine Cole holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University. After teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Cole joined Berkeley's department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies in 2007.

Assistant Professor Sudipto Chatterjee, a specialist in Asian performance in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, is planning to complete part of a book entitled Indian Popular Theatres: Masses, Myths, and Movements, contracted to Routledge in the series “Theatres of the World,” edited by John Russell Brown. This book will fill a void in theater studies, where work on Indian theater has typically focused on classical dramatic texts or urban theaters.

William Worthen's fields include dramatic literature and theory, performance theory, modern drama, and Shakespeare.

Ph.D candidate (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies) Gretchen Case focuses in her dissertation, Medical Scarring and the Performance of Memory, on the representations of scars in medical, literary, and theatrical discourse, engaging the rhetoric of medicine in dialogue with issues of disability.

Nilgun Bayraktar enters the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies this fall with a degree in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University in Turkey, focusing on the history and culture of Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East with a special interest in questions of religious, gender, and national identity. Bayraktar plans to continue her interdisciplinary work on these issues, focusing on the role of performance in political and religious activity.

While at Berkeley, F. Lane Harwell will pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, hoping to expand his engagement with the work of Michel Foucault in the field of visual culture by exploring contemporary and international sites of surveillance and censored performance.

At Berkeley, Nina Billone will be a candidate for the Ph.D in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in Gender Studies, viewing her undergraduate thesis, ”The Women Writers Workshop at Cook County Jail: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Performance,” as a starting point for socially significant graduate work.