03 Nov Discourses of Memory: The Marginalization of Bronislava Nijinska
Lynn Garafola (Dance History, Columbia University)
Tuesday, November 3, 2015 / 5:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
Lynn Garafola is Distinguished Professor of Dance History at Columbia University/Barnard College. A dance historian, critic and contributor for The Nation, Garafola’s importance to Dance and Performance Studies was best described by noted dance critic, Marcia B. Siegel: “I do not know of another dance historian with the courage and the sophistication to bypass the adulatory discourse that protects the dance field from investigative research.”
Garafola was born in New York City, attended Hunter College High School and Barnard College, and graduated in 1968. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York in 1985. Since 2000, she has taught at Columbia University/Barnard College, where she is a distinguished professor of dance history. Garafola was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute (formerly the Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities) from 1991 to 1992, and she has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2005, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Garafola’s books, essays, book reviews, edited volumes, catalogue entries, and translations, have touched on dance history, ranging from the Romantic ballerina to the New York City Ballet. Her first book, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which received the De la Torre Bueno Prize, covered the development of twentieth-century dance.
Subsequent books include André Levinson on Dance (editor, with Joan Acocella, 1991); The Diaries of Marius Petipa (translator and editor, 1992); José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir (editor, 1998) [winner of the Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication from the Congress on Research in Dance]; Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on the Romantic Ballet (editor, 1997); The Ballet Russes and Its World (editor, with Nancy Van Norman Baer, 1999) [winner of the Kurt Weill Book Prize]; and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (2005). Between 1991 and 1998 Garafola was editor of the monograph series Studies in Dance History for the Society of Dance History Scholars. Her current work focuses on the life and work of the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska.
Sponsored by the Dept. of Theater and Dance, Hemispheric South(s), and the IHC.