Center for World Performance Studies is committed to supporting faculty and and graduates to carry out innovative and interdisciplinary research in the field of Performance Studies, including projects that employ intersectional insights, ethnography and performance as research. This year, CWPS is providing support for six Graduate Fellows and seven Faculty Fellows in research projects that span the globe. 

2019 Graduate Fellows

Lisa Decenteceo | PhD Program in Ethnomusicology
Lisa Decenteceo will travel to the Philippines to continue her research on the Igorot ethnic minority, a collective population of “tribal” sub-groups based in the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) of Northern Philippines. She writes about the plural and conflicting expressions of indigeneity as examined in staged musical performances of indigenous expressive traditions and their surrounding socio-cultural and historical contexts.

Evan Haywood | MSI Program in School of Information

Evan will travel to Jamaica, meeting with elders in the Rastafarian and Maroon communities, recording video footage to preserve ritual performances and oral narratives, with a focus on anticolonial perspectives in Jamaican history. 

Sherry Lin | MFA Program in Dance

For her summer research, Sherry Lin will be going to Los Angeles, California and various cities in Taiwan to study and compare street dance culture between the U.S. and Taiwan. She will engage in ethnographic research among Taiwanese Indigenous communities, looking at culture and history, food and dance rituals, and other performance practices at the Bunun Cultural and Education Foundation.

Marjoris Regus | PhD Program in Music Education

Marjoris Regus’s research inteterests include secondary instrumental methods, hip hop pedagogy, vernacular musicianship, and informal learning. This summer, Marjoris will be conducting research focusing on everyday performances and the diverse identities of hip hop artists in Japan, Germany, and England.

Jean Carlo Ureña Gonzalez | MM Program in Percussion Performance

Ureña Gonzalez’s  Center for World Performance Studies research is centered around the diasporic lineage between the rhythms of folkloric music of the Dominican Republic and west and central Africa. He will travel to the Dominican Republic this summer, and plans to do future research in West Africa. 

Mario Vircha | MFA Program in Dance

Vircha’s project “Migrare” chronicles the personal and creative journeys of immigrant dance artists as an exploration of the ways they are creating work in response to the political situations in Syria and Nicaragua and the challenges of the new environment in France and Costa Rica, where they encountered a different language, unfamiliar traditions, financial obstacles, and other disputes. His research this summer will take place in France, Jordan and Costa Rica.

2019 Faculty Fellows

Christ-Anne Castro | Associate Professor of Musicology

Dr. Castro will travel to Winnipeg, Canada for Folklorama, the world’s largest and longest running multicultural festival, in order to examine how community groups deploy music and dance as acts of self-determination. 

Clare Croft | Associate Professor of Dance & American Culture

EXPLODE is a research project in which Croft explores how curating a mixed repertory evening of dance is the live performance corollary to print scholars editing of print anthologies. 

Xiaodong Hottman-Wei | Lecturer, Residential College

Professor Hottman-Wei will travel to Mongolia to learn how to play Ma Tou Qin, and take lessons on Chinese bamboo flute. 

Mbala Nkanga | Associate Professor of Theatre Studies

Following the election and inauguration of Felix Antoine Tshilombo Tshisekedi, Nkanga will travel to Democratic Republic of Congo to observe changes in artists’ behaviors and works as compared to the previous years of autocracy and dictatorship under Mobutu and Kabila. 

Stephen Rush | Professor of Performing Arts Technology

The research will focus on experience-based Music Theory in order to create a way for students to experience basic elements of Music Theory with no presumption of a ground or preference toward Western European music or history. Fieldwork will take place in Mysore, India.

Carlos Rodriguez | Associate Professor of Music Education

Dr. Rodriguez's research will look at how higher education in Mexico helps prepare students for careers in the performing arts. 

Malcolm Tulip | Assistant Professor of Theatre

Professor Tulip will work on the development of "After Unica," a multi-media performance inspired by Unica Zürn, a German Surrealist writer and artist best known for her anagrammatic poems and automatic drawings.