Interview with W.B. Worthen : what is performance studies?.

Interview with W.B. Worthen, conducted by Diana Taylor, founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. This interview is a part of a series curated by the Hemispheric Institute, articulated around the question 'What is Performance Studies?' The series aims to provide a multifaceted approach to the often difficult task of defining the coordinates of both a field of academic study as well as a lens through which to assess and document cultural practice and embodied behavior. The contingent definitions documented in this series are based on the groundbreaking experiences and the scholarly endeavors of renowned figures in contemporary performance studies and practice. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

W.B. Worthen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2003) Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (University of California Press, 1992), The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of Performance (Princeton University Press, 1984), Modern Drama: Plays, Criticism, Theory (Wadsworth, 1995), and of many articles on modern drama, Shakespeare, and theories of performance. He is also the author of several widely used textbooks on dramatic literature, most recently The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. Professor Worthen received his B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and his Ph. D. in English from Princeton University, and has held research fellowships form the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. He is past editor of Theatre Journal and current co-editor of Modern Drama. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics