Rebecca Schneider
Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies:
Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
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, writing on performance art, photography, architecture, and "performative" everyday life. She teaches theatre history as well as visual culture and performance studies. Her most recent book engages historical reenactment in popular culture, theatre, and visual art.
Biography
Rebecca Schneider, Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, teaches performance studies, theater studies, and theories of intermedia. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997) and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge 2011). She has coedited the anthology Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide to 20th-Century Directing. She is a consortium editor for TDR: The Drama Review, contributing editor to Women and Theatre, coeditor with David Krasner of the book series "Theatre: Theory/Text/Performance" with University of Michigan Press, and consulting editor for the seies "Performance Interventions" with Palgrave McMillin. Schneider has published essays in several anthologies, including Psychoanalysis and Performance, Acting Out: Feminist Performance, Performance and Cultural Politics, Performance Cosmologies, Performance and the City, 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, and delivered lectures at museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon.
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 theory. Since that book, I have written on performance art, photography, architecture, and everyday life as "performative."
My second book, titled Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, focused on practices in visual and performance art that labor under the rubric "reenactment." In it, I explore the wide range of both live and mediated performance — mostly in performance art, theatre, and photography — that attempts to "step into time" and duplicate or even "touch" prior historical acts and events. For this book, I studied Civil War reenactments and the passionate investments of those who engage in reenactment. I compared 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 museum 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 circulation vis a vis the "experience" of the art participant. It is these shifts, their problems and promises, that that book charts and explores.
I am currently at work on a third book on the topic of "Acting in Ruins." This project looks at the live body and the "labor" of acting in relation to neoliberal investments in "creative capital." I'm thinking about the literal ruins of historical theatres (such as those of ancient Greece); the question of whether there are ruins (or "ruin value") in and of acting and performance; and also the matter of theatrical time and theatrical work in relation to capitalism's time and capitalism's work. I am currently editing a special issue of TDR on "Precarity" that has some relationship to this project as a whole.
Degrees
Ph.D.
Awards
co-PI on Mellon grant for dance scholarship.
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.
Consortium Editor for 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 http://performancetheory.blogspot.com for "Performance Theory and Theatre Histories"
See http://moderntheatre.blogspot.com for "20th-Century Theatre and Performance"
See http://affectlabortheatricality.blogspot.com/2011/01/10.html
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."
Funded Research
N/A
Curriculum Vitae
