The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies

With its interdisciplinary approach and focus on life and culture, this collection of 28 articles delineates the scope of the field, the interpretive methods used, and its theoretical and ethical presumptions. Intended for use in communication studies, performance studies, theater arts and culture studies. After a introduction to the current state of performance studies, contributors offer such as "performance trouble" (for example, the utopian performative) performing history as a politics of location, conducting performance of and beyond literature, addressing the issues of performance and pedagogy, understanding performing ethnography and performance ethnography, and working through performance and politics. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

D. Soyini Madison (Ph.D., Northwestern University; M.A., University of Illinois; B.A., Chicago State University) is considered to be one of the top scholars in performance studies and in critical ethnography. Her published works focus on performance ethnography and the intersections between gender and critical race theory. Her teaching centers on myth and popular culture, performance ethnography, performance of literature for social change, and the political economy of performance. Madison is a Fulbright Scholar and recently completed a visiting lectureship at the University of Ghana. She also recently returned from the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in Belagio, Italy where she was writing her current project focusing on staging/performing local debates surrounding human rights and traditional religious practices as these debates are influenced by the global market and national development. She has taught a graduate course in performance ethnography for fourteen years.She is both nationally and internationally known for her published work and her performances, and she is the recipient of numerous awards from the National Communication Association.  

Judith Hamera received her B.A. (1980) in Mass Communication from Wayne State University and her M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1987) in Interpretation and Performance Studies respectively from Northwestern University. She is currently the Acting Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters, and Professor of Communication Studies and Theatre Arts and Dance at California State University, Los Angeles. She has served as Editor of Text and Performance Quarterly, the journal of theNational Communication Association Division of Performance Studies. Her publications have appeared in Cultural Studies, TDR: The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Topics, and Women and Language. She is the recipient of the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies, and was named President's Distinguished Professor at California State University in 2004. She is coeditor, with D. Soyini Madison, of the SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies.