Professor James Harding
I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park (USA). Prior to joining the faculty at Warwick’s School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, I was Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, and have twice been a Guest Professor in the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Moving literally between academic disciplines and cultures has had a profound effect on the work I do as a teacher and scholar. My teaching focuses on the intersection of performance and cultural politics, and it draws heavily on my long-standing interest in the theory and history of the avant-gardes. I am particularly interested in how the “blurring of art and life” in the avant-gardes opens the door for rethinking the very notion of what constitutes an avant-garde as such, and much of my work over the past decade has focused on variations of this central question.
Working as a theatre historian and theorist, I have taught a wide range of courses on modernism, 20th and 21st century experimental theatre and performance, performance art, theories of the avant-garde, theatre in the 1960s, post-9/11 performance, espionage and surveillance cultures, and performance studies. In my current research, I have begun to consider how, as a social political phenomenon, the “blurring of art and life” is by no means unique to the avant-gardes. I am interested in how the broad notion of performance that avant-garde artists helped to cultivate might help us to gain a more critical understanding of the politics of espionage and surveillance cultures.
PUBLICATIONS:
BOOKS:
Authored:
Theories of Avant-Garde Performance. Completed Manuscript. (forthcoming)
Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde. Authored. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Adorno and "a Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Authored. SUNY Press, 1997.
Edited:
The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum. Co-Edited Volume with Cindy Rosenthal. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies. Co-Edited Volume with Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. Co-Edited Volume with John Rouse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. Edited Volume. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.
“Theatre in the Sixties,” Special Topics Issue of Theatre Survey 43.1 (2002). Co-edited with Mike Sell.
ARTICLES (Selected):
“‘You forgot Your Double Security Check’: Performance in Radio Drama, Poetic Discourse and the False Transmissions of the Special Operations Executive,” (Forthcoming, Performance Research).
“Introduction: Intersections,” Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical. Edited by Mike Sell. Palgrave MacMillian, 2011.
“Experimenting with an Unfinished Discipline: Richard Schechner, the Avant-Garde and the Performance Studies,” co-authored with Cindy Rosenthal in The Rise of Performance Studies: Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum. Co-Edited Volume with Cindy Rosenthal. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.
“Le collage et ses avant-gardes: pour une “historiographie” de la performance améicaine avant-gardeiste,” [“Collage Enactments and Engendered Vanguards: Toward a Feminist Historiography of American Avant-Garde Performance”] Translated by Aloysia Calleux. Théâtre / Public, revue trimestrielle 190.3 (2008): 78-81.
“Counterbalancing the Pendulum Effect: Politics and the Discourse of Post-9/11 Theatre,” Theatre Survey 48.1 (2007): 19-25.
“Between Characteristics, Continuities and Change: Theorizing the Legacy of Radical Theaters,” (Co-authored with Cindy Rosenthal). Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies. Co-Edited Volume with Cindy Rosenthal Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 1-25.
“From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance,” Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. Edited by James Harding and John Rouse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2006. 18-40.
“From Anti-culture to Counter-Culture: the Emergence of American Avant-garde Performance Events,” Ereignis: Konzeptionen einies Begriffs in Geschichte, Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Thomas Rathmann. Köln, Weimar und Wein: Böhlau Verlag, 2003. 243-271.
“Exile from Alienation: Brechtian Aesthetics, the Death of the Director, and Peter Brook’s Mahabharata.” Modern Drama 44.4 (2001): 416-436
“Research and Pedagogy for a Turbulent Decade: Approaching the Legacy of Sixties Theatre and Performance,” co-authored with Mike Sell, Theatre Survey 43.1 (2002): 1-5.
“The Simplest Surrealist Act: Valerie Solanas and the (Re)Assertion of Avant-Garde Priorities.” TDR 45.4 (2001): 142-162.
"Adorno, Ellison and the Critique of Jazz." Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 129-58.
* reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 111, ed. Linda Pavlovski (Farmington Hills: The Gale Group, 2001), 131-43.
“Historicity, the Cinematic and Pam Gems’s Queen Christina,” Contemporary Drama in English 7 (2000): 179-187.
“Seduction, Stage and Radical Sexual Identity: Artaud Beyond the Margins of the Liberal Text,” Theatre Symposium 8 (2000): 43-51.
“Introduction,” Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 1-11.
“Dissent Behind the Barricades: Radical Art, Radical Politics, and Avant-Garde Divisions,” Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 176-201.
"Cloud Cover: (Re)Dressing Desire and Comfortable Subversions in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine." PMLA 113.2 (1998):258-272 .
Office: G23, Millburn House
Course taught in 2010-11:
(second year Aspects of Theatre and Performance)
