Interview with Tracy Davis : what is performance studies?.

Interview with Tracy Davis, 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

Tracy C. Davis (Ph. D. University of Warwick) holds a joint appointment in the Departments of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies, and is Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph. D. in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. A feminist theater historian, her areas of interest include 19C British theater history, gender and theater, economics and business history of theater, performance theory, research methodology, museum studies, and Cold War studies. She is the author of Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (1991), George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre (1994), The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (2000), Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (2007), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatres History (2008), and The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008), and co-editor of Playwriting and Nineteenth-Century British Women (1999), Theories of Theatricality (2002), and Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research (2007). She is General Editor of the Theatre and Performance Theory series for Cambridge University Press. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics