Catherine M. Cole
Fellow
Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Drama and Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington, and the author of Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) and Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (2001). Cole has co-edited the book Africa After Gender? (2007) and special journal issues on “African and Afro-Caribbean Performance” and “Routes of Blackface” for Theatre Survey and TDR, respectively. Cole’s disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat toured North America between 2002 and 2005. She has published articles in Africa, Boom: A Journal of California, Critical Inquiry, Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, Disability Studies Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, Theatre, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and TDR, as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. Cole has held previous positions as Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as senior editor of the journal Theatre Survey.
THIS AUTHOR WROTE
January 23, 2018
In this video-interview, IRC-Fellow Catherine Cole, Professor of Drama and Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington, talks about her work and in what way her personal background has been interwoven with the course of her studies and research. Cole has been focussing her research first on Ghana and later on South Africa. In this interview, she stresses to what extent the many similarities to the USA concerning aspects of segregation can be brought to light through a performance studies approach. Introducing her current research project on “Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice,” Cole explains her interest in contemporary choreographers from post-apartheid South Africa, that are trying to unravel histories and injustice through their artistic work. She underlines how many political implications a research on embodied knowledge is carrying in this context.
