Professor
she/her. My name is reclaimed from the patronym, and there is no correct pronunciation: it's a made-up name, without my old German Umlauts. Feel free to pronounce it as you wish.
Office Information:
3216 Angell Hall hours: By Appointment - just be in touch
Disability and Trauma Studies; Graduate Faculty; Science Fiction and Fantasy; Drama and Performance; English; Ecocriticism; Theory; Visual Culture; Gender and Sexuality; Creative Writing; Poetry and Poetics
Education/Degree:
PhD, Falmouth College of Art/Plymouth University 1999
Current Courses
ENGLISH 318-001
Genre Studies
Highlighted Work and Publications
Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape
Petra Kuppers
Performances in hospices, on beaches and at the memory of slavery medicine, cross-cultural myth making in Wales, New Zealand and the United States, communal poetry among mental health system survivors, Butoh dancers and in video installations; Deleuzoguattarian aesthetics and playful rhizomes.
Performance scholar and community artist Petra Kuppers engages these sites and practices as laboratories of experimental disability culture. Here, the possibility of new forms of embodiment, engagement and community take shape at the intersection of the past and the emerging future, in...
Somatic Engagement
Edited by Petra Kuppers
Literary Nonfiction. Political Science. Edited by community artist, scholar, and dancer Petra Kuppers (author of Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge and Community Performance: An Introduction), the book opens with Arnieville, a Californian protest camp of disability, homelessness, and poverty activists. From there, a series of enactments welcome trespass and incursion in the name of survival. Amy Sara Carroll on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a GPS phone that uses poetry to lead the disoriented and thirsty to water caches and safety sites in the US-Mexican...
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The Olimpias Disability Culture Projects: Embodied Poetics
Produced by Petra Kuppers
A DVD, with three performance videos, available for free for teachers, artists, activists and others who build disability culture.
Journey To The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2011, 8 mins)
http://youtu.be/no-ZohJxWZE
Social somatics, social sculpture: a participatory performance focused on the Peter Eisenman Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, located in Berlin. The disabled people of Germany sued for access to the site, and lost. A ritual action re-imagines a memorial of life. Filmed at the ...
Theatre and Disability
Petra Kuppers
How do disabled people experience theatre, as both audience members and performers? How has the institution of theatre responded to disability over time? How can we create new spaces for performance and attend to different communities’ forms of expression?
This insightful and engaging text examines the complex relationship between theatre and disability, bringing together a wide variety of performance examples in order to explore theatrical disability through the conceptual frameworks of disability as spectacle, narrative, and experience.
