Rebecca Schneider
Associate Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance:
Theatre, Speech & Dance
Phone: +1 401 863 9223
Rebecca_Schneider@Brown.EDU
Rebecca Schneider has written extensively on theatre and performance practices that stretch accepted borders around media. She has written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative." She teaches in theatre history as well as on performance art, gender- and race-critical performance, and visual culture and performance. She is currently completing a book on "Reenactment" that engages historical reenactment in popular culture, theatre, and visual art.
Biography
Rebecca Schneider, Chair of the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, teaches performance studies, theater studies, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997) and working on a second book titled Reenactment: Essays on Performance Remains in Visual Culture . She has coedited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing. She is a contributing editor to TDR: The Drama Review and coeditor with David Krasner of the book series "Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance" with University of Michigan Press. Schneider has published essays in several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, and the essay "Solo Solo Solo" in After Criticism. As a "performing theorist," she has collaborated with artists at such sites as the British Museum in London and the Mobile Academy in Berlin.
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Theatre_Speech_Dance/Faculty_Authors_RS.html
Interests
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 thoery. Since that book, I have written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative."
I am currently working on practices in visual and performance art that labor under the rubric "reenactment." I am interested in exploring the wide range of both live and mediated performance — mostly in performance art, digital art, theatre, and photography — that attempts to "step into time" and duplicate or even "touch" prior historical acts and events. For some time I have studied Civil War reenactments and the passionate investments of those who engage in reenactment. I am interested in comparing 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 museal 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 cirulation vis a vis the "experience" of the art participant. It is these shifts, their problems and promises, that my work attempts to explore.
Degrees
Ph.D.
Awards
Visiting Distinguished Professorship. Queen Mary College, University of London. 2006.
Pembroke Fellowship, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University. 2004-5.
2001-2 President's Council of Cornell Women Research Grant.
1998,'99,'00 Society for the Humanities Research Grants, Cornell University.
Affiliations
Co-editor with David Krasner of book series "Theater: Theory/Text/Performance." University of Michigan Press.
Editorial Board of the journal Theatre Survey, American Society for Theatre Research.
Editorial Board of the London Palgrave MacMillan book series Performance Interventions. Co-General Editors Brian Reynolds and Elaine Aston.
Contributing Editor to The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies, edited by Richard Schechner.
Advisory Board to Play: A Journal of Plays.
President of the Women and Theatre Program, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 2000-2002
Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Modern Language Association
Performance Studies International
American Society of Theatre Research
Teaching
See www.art-performance.blogspot.com for "Performance, Art, and Everyday Life."
See www.performancetheory.blogspot.com for "Performance Theory and Theatre Histories"
See www.moderntheatre.blogspot.com for "20th-Century Theatre and Performance"
Other classes include "Performativity and the Body: Theatres of Gender and Race" and graduate seminars on various topics in "Performance and Archive Culture" and on "Photography and Performance" or Still Living.
Funded Research
N/A
Curriculum Vitae
