Dare to Know Dance

Rebekah Kowal

Appointment(s):

Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Dance, MFA Program Co-Director and Graduate Advisor, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Scholar

College(s): Liberal Arts & Sciences

Rebekah Kowal’s research in dance studies investigates how moving bodies functioned as agents of social change in postwar America. Her current project focuses on the politics of performances of international dance in New York City, newly anointed “cultural capital of the world.” While performances by global performers contributed to a larger national trend toward multi-cultural integration, making audiences more welcoming of foreigners, they also help to reveal the dynamics of a charged racial and ethnic atmosphere leading up to the American civil rights movement and national immigration reform in the 1960s. Kowal is excited to find ways of making this historical information relevant to contemporary scholarship and questions regarding the body politic in the mid-20th century. Related video.

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