CLAS News Release—October 13 , 2009

Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor—TRACY C. DAVIS

Two Public Talks on Performance Studies/American Studies:

“Acting Black, 1824”
Wednesday 14 October at 5:00 in Gerber Lounge, 304 EPB, Reception following

Charles Matthews, a white English music hall performer, toured the United States and developed popular impersonations of African Americans apparently without the use of black make-up. The evidence raises penetrating questions about the encoding and perceptibility of race, its bi-national legibility, and the prototypes for blackface minstrelsy.

“The Witness Protection Program: Making Theatre, Every Day”
Thursday 15 October at 5:30 in 107 EPB

In the federal Witness Protection Program developed during the Cold War, protected witnesses succeed as performers only when their performances are undetectable.  This is the ultimate covert scenario: spectators do not know that they are witness to anything in particular.  The “society of the spectacle” is inverted to demonstrate the degree to which we rely upon urban and suburban society being unremarkable, unspectacular, and bland.

TRACY C. DAVIS is Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Professor of Theatre and English, and Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, as well as the current President of the American Society for Theatre Research. Her most recent books include Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (2007), Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research (2007), The Performing Society: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies (2008), Theatricality (2003), and The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914 (2000), winner of the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association.

 

The Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorships Program was established in 1978-79 based on a bequest from the late Ida Beam of Vinton, Iowa, who willed her family farm to the UI Foundation. The proceeds from the farm's sale enabled the UI to establish a fund that brings top scholars in a variety of fields to the university for lectures and discussions.

Professor Davis’s visit is co-sponsored by the Departments of American Studies, English, History, and Theatre Arts; the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts; and the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium.