9 March 2012
We have two new colleagues joining the Department on 1 September 2012.
Dr Kate Elswit, currently holder of a Mellon postdoctoral award at Stanford University, is our new Lecturer in Theatre and Performance. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2009. Her forthcoming book, Watching Weimar Dance will be published by Oxford University Press. Her research historicizes and theorizes spectatorship in interwar Germany, working with archival accounts as creative, affective, and translative as well as situated in a particular time and place. Encompassing the often-separated performance situations of concert stages, revues, experimental theatres, and cabaret, the book uses culturally-situated watching to remap the boundaries of Weimar dance at the same time as it places pressure on the situation of that reception. Her current project is on the infrastructure for international touring from the early 20th century to the present, beginning with Pina Bausch's 'World Cities' travelogue pieces that appear in the Cultural Olympiad of the 2012 London Olympics. Dr Elswit has a background as a professional dancer, and she continues to present devised performances.
Dr Peter Falconer, our new Lecturer in Film, obtained his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2011. He has taught Film Studies at Warwick, Birmingham and Worcester. His PhD on 'Melancholy in Hollywood Westerns' drew on the notion of melancholy to provoke new interpretations of Western movies, address neglected aspects of the genre and reflect on its changing role in Film Studies. This research project involved situating Westerns in relation to other disciplines, including literary theory, art history and philosophy. His on-going research into this area includes a book-length project on the 'afterlife' of the Western genre in popular culture. It will address the decline of the public and commercial profile of the Western and examine the residual presence of Western themes and tropes across different popular forms, genres and media.