Emily Wilcox

Professor Wilcox is on leave Winter 2019.

Research Interests:

My research uses dance as a lens to explore the modern and contemporary transformations of China’s socialist culture, both in China and in transnational contexts. Having been trained in cultural anthropology, performance studies, and the history of science, I employ interdisciplinary methods in my research. My current theoretical interests converge around themes of gender and ethnicity, leftist culture, and inter-Asian and Third World interculturalism during the Cold War. I have published a range of journal articles and book chapters on these and related subjects, which can be found here.

My first book, Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy, was published by the University of California Press in October 2018. As the first English-language history of dance in the People’s Republic of China, it uses previously unexamined dance films, a wide range of Chinese-language published and archival materials, and ethnographic field research to analyze the work of major Chinese choreographers over the period from 1935 to 2015. The book challenges the previously held view that Soviet ballet was the primary transnational force shaping China’s socialist dance creation, instead showing the impact of a broader range of intercultural connections, from Trinidad and London to North Korea and Uzbekistan. It shows the important role that ethnic minority and diaspora artists played in the construction of China’s national dance forms and demonstrates continuities and changes from the early socialist period to the twenty-first century. It argues that socialist dance experiments laid the basis for “Chinese dance,” a contemporary concert genre widely practiced in China and around the world.

Current Projects:

Both of my current book projects deal with transnational themes that link China to other parts of Asia and the globe. I am currently completing a co-edited collection titled Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia that explores dance as a critical cultural practice across the East Asian region. I have also been working on a second monograph, tentatively titled “Choreographing Cold War Asia,” which received a grant from the Social Science Research Council InterAsia Program in 2016-17. This project examines a group of border-crossing women dancers of Asian descent and their work around the world from the 1930s to the 1960s. Focusing on representations of “Asia” articulated through different forms of leftist modernism, the project considers how global dance circuits operated during the Cold War era and how Asian women dancers forged strategies of internationalism by navigating national, racial, political, and gender boundaries and solidarities.

Teaching Interests:

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses and advise undergraduate and graduate research in a range of fields, including Asian studies, modern Chinese studies, and dance and performance studies. Graduate seminars I have taught recently include “Rethinking China After 1949: New Approaches in PRC Cultural Studies” (last offered in Fall 2018) and “Critical Studies in Asian Performance: Indonesia and China” (to be offered in Winter 2020). I will be on leave in the Winter 2019 semester but will be available for consultation through email. I welcome inquiries from prospective students. More information on my courses and current and past supervised research can be found here.