Fellows

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University. She is Director of York's MA/PhD Program in Theatre & Performance Studies and teaches courses on devised theatre, contemporary theatre, performance art, and practice-based research. Her research focuses on performing gender and sexuality, site-specific and urban performance, intermediality in performance, and disciplinary genealogies in performance studies. She is Editor in Chief of Canadian Theatre Review; Editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto and Conversations Across Borders; and Editor of several special issues of journals. In 2015, she was awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for her book Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Palgrave, 2014). Laura has worked as a director and dramaturg on a number of productions in North America and co-curated research-based art projects that investigate intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies. Most recently, she has been moonlighting as a performance artist and collaborating on activist, photo-based actions in and around Toronto. She is Co-Investigator and Board Member of the Canadian Consortium for Performance and Politics in the Americas, a research group which explores the relationship between performance and activism through a hemispheric methods and encounters, working in collaboration with NYU’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Specialization: While my previous work has focused primarily on artists from Canada, the US, and Mexico, I am interested in hemispheric approaches to performance that foreground “nation" and geopolitical borders as performative constructions.

Keywords: Performance art, contemporary theatre, site-specificity, public space interventions, hemispheric performance

Teresa Macías earned a Ph.D. from OISE at the University of Toronto. Her Ph.D. Thesis entitled "On the Pawprints of Terror": The Human Rights Regime and the Production of Truth and Subjectivity in Post-Authoritarian Chile traces 20 years of history in the development of Chilean state policy to deal with human rights abuses. Her work deals with issues of disappearances, torture, truth commissions and compensation policy. Her research and teaching interests also include professional and research ethics, and critical anti-racist and anti-colonial practice and teaching methods.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Chile

Keywords: Human Rights , Ethics, Education & Pedagogy, Research methodology, Professional competency profiles

Emiro Martínez-Osorio’s research focuses on Colonial Spanish American literature, chiefly the narrative heroic poems about the exploration and conquest of the New World. His book Authority, Piracy and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing (Bucknell University Press, 2016) examines the intersection between social class, literary taste and political dissent in Juan de Castellanos’ Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. He is currently working on a critical edition of the account presented by indigenous chieftain Diego de Torres to King Philip II of Spain in 1586. His research has been supported by the John Carter Brown Library and the Newberry Library. At York University, he teaches courses on sixteenth century Spanish epic and heroic poetry, Spanish-American Modernismo and Hispanic Caribbean Literature.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Latin America

Keywords: Colonial, literature,  poetry,

Her research is on the formation of political and moral agency in situations of conflict or crisis in Latin American agrarian communities, and she specializes in political and historical anthropology with interests in the anthropology of religion, actor-network theory, feminist anthropology, and political ecology. Topics of study include revolution; violence; the Cold War; peasant and rural livelihoods; insurgencies; indigeneity; environmental and human rights movements; gender; state formation; animal geographies; and frontier capitalism. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Guatemala, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba. Her monograph The Good Road: Conscience and Consciousness in a Post-Revolutionary Mayan Village in Guatemala is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Guatemala, Chile, Cuba and Mexico

Keywords: Anthropology , Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Religion, Revolution, Political Ecology, Political Theology

McGillivray’s commitment to comparative studies and micro-history combined with her gravitation toward early XXth century developments—war, boom, and bust at the global level and nationalism, populism, and revolution at the local level—motivated her book, "Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State-Formation in Cuba, 1868-1958" (Duke University, 2009) and her new research on Brazil.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Cuba, Mexico,

Keywords: Social Development and Welfare; South America

Professor at FES, Director of the Las Nubes Project, Chair in Neotropical Conservation.  20 years experience working with peasant and indigenous communities in rural Costa Rica on projects regarding community-based environmental conservation and community wellbeing.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Costa Rica, Spain

Keywords: Biological Corridors, Arts-based Community Wellbeing,

Drawing on theoretical interests in culture, nationalism, colonialism, representation, performance and sexuality, Professor Murray has conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean, New Zealand and Canada that examines the processes and politics of identity making projects and their relations to local, national and transnational political and economic forces. He is the author of numerous articles, a book investigating the production of cultural identity in relation to gender, sexuality and race in Martinique ("Opacity: Gender, Sexuality, Race and the Problem of Identity in Martinique", Peter Lang 2002), an edited volume examining the production of homophobia in different socio-political contexts ("Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space", Duke University Press, 2009), and most recently, a book exploring social attitudes towards homosexuality and the lives of queer men in Barbados ("Flaming Souls: Homosexuality, Homophobia and Social Change in Barbados", University of Toronto Press, 2012). A new project examines the experiences of 'queer refugees' with the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board and Canadian queer urban communities.

Country(ies) or Region(s) of Interest: Caribbean, New Zealand and Canada

Keywords: Culture, Nationalism, Colonialism, Representation, Performance and Sexuality

Danielle Robinson is a dance scholar who researches the cross-cultural movement of Afro-Diasporic popular dances within the Americas. Her research has been recognized with awards from the Society of Dance History Scholars, the Congress on Research in Dance, and the American Theatre focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. In addition, during 2011-12, she was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chichester (UK), sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust.

Dr. Robinson’s book manuscript, Modern Moves: Ragtime Dancing and American Cultures (under contract with Oxford University Press), examines how notions of modernity were embodied in early 20th century social dancing and the nascent dance industry that supported it. Her articles on ragtime, jazz and swing dancing in the United States have been published in Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Dance Research Journal (US), Dance Chronicle (US), Dance Research (UK), Research in Dance Education (UK), and the edited collection I See America Dancing (with Juliet McMains). She has recently presented papers at the Congress on Research in Dance, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society of Dance History Scholars and the Symposium on Popular Dance and Music (now known as PoP Moves).

Professor Robinson is currently leading a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project in Bahia, Brazil with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). This project explores samba de roda, a dance and music complex with roots in Afro-Brazilian slave cultures, which was recently recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage. The project will culminate in a co-authored book, Roots Sambas: Collaborations and Conflicts in Dancing, Music and Culture, that explores the potential for decolonizing cross-cultural research. Her first article from this research project appears in Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Music and Dance (Ashgate), co-authored with Jeff Packman.

Dr. Robinson taught at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador (Brazil), University of California (Riverside), and University of Texas (Austin) before joining the faculty in York University’s Department of Dance in 2005. She is cross-appointed to the Graduate Programs in Theatre Studies and Communication and Culture and is a Fellow of York’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean and of Winters College. She received the Faculty of Fine Arts Dean’s Teaching Award for junior faculty in 2009.