The TORCH Reimagining Performance Network is delighted to host a roundtable discussion on ‘Embodiment Onstage’ with Alice Baldock (DPhil in History candidate, Wolfson), Professor Susan Jones (Emeritus Professor of English Literature, St Hilda’s), and Leverhulme Visiting Professor Felicia McCarren (Professor of French, Tulane). Light refreshments provided. All welcome!
TORCH Reimagining Performance Network: ‘Embodiment Onstage’ Roundtable
12.30–1.30 pm
Monday 21 November (week 7)
C. Day-Lewis Room, Wadham College
Alice Baldock
DPhil candidate in History, Wolfson College, Oxford
Alice Baldock is a DPhil researcher in History at the University of Oxford, studying the lives and ideas of women dancers in post-war Japan. Her recent publications include ‘Body (of) Knowledge: Women, the Body, and Dance in Twentieth Century Japan’ (Journal of Asian Studies, January 2022). Alice also has a creative practice, with recent work including a brief appearance in Nakajima Natsu’s Yume no yume, oku no oku, nokori no hi (April 2022) and a solo piece in butoh company Mutekisha’s ‘The Body without the Border’ (July 2022).
Susan Jones
Emeritus Professor, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
Susan Jones is Emeritus Professor of English Literature. She taught for over twenty-five years at St Hilda’s College and the English Faculty. She is author of Conrad and Women, and Literature, Modernism, and Dance (for Oxford University Press) and publishes widely on modernism, and the history and aesthetics of dance. Formerly a soloist with the Scottish Ballet, Glasgow, she is founder and director of Dance Scholarship Oxford (www.torch.ox.ac.uk/dansox). She has published articles on dance in relation to Shakespeare, Conrad, Woolf, Yeats, DH Lawrence. Following a Leverhulme Award, she is currently writing a book on Samuel Beckett and kinaesthetics. In 2021-22 she received a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship from TORCH to lead a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, “Dance as Grace: Paradoxes and Possibilities”.
Felicia McCarren
Professor of French, Tulane University
Felicia McCarren is Levehulme Visiting Professor at Oxford (Michaelmas 2022 and 2023). Professor of French at Tulane University and associated faculty in Film Studies, she is a cultural historian and performance theorist. Felicia is the author of four books: Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford University Press, Writing Science Series, 1998); Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford 2003); French Moves; The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013), awarded the De la Torre Bueno Prize by the Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Outstanding Publication of the Year 2014 from the Congress on Research in Dance. Her new book, One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet; La Source 1866-2014 (Oxford, 2020) explores science, sex and race in four historical performances of an Orientalist environmental ballet by the Paris Opera’s first archivist. In 2016-17, Felicia was a Resident Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and is a member of the Cultural History of Dance Seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris where she is collaborating on the project Dis-Orienting Bodies with colleagues in the CRH (History Department) and the Université Paris-Descartes.
