Kathleen M Gough
University of Vermont, English / Performance Studies, Faculty Member
- Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Intermediality, Postdramatic theatre, Theatre Studies, Transmedia, and 29 moreRace and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, American Studies, Irish Studies, Caribbean Studies, Atlantic World, Postcolonial Studies, Globalization, Digital Culture, Art History, Women's Studies, Critical Race Theory, Drama, Theatre, Aby Warburg, Mimetic Theory, Irish Drama, Black Atlantic, Trinidad Carnival, J.M. Synge, Richard Schechner, Medieval Art, Sound studies, Contemporary Performance Art in the Context of Digital Arts and New Media, Theatre History, Performing Arts, Dramaturgy, Intercultural Performance, and Performance Artedit
- Katie Gough holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California-Berkeley (2005). Prior to coming t... moreKatie Gough holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California-Berkeley (2005). Prior to coming to UVM, she taught in the American Conservatory Theatre MFA program in San Francisco (2005), the Dept of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at UC-Berkeley (2005), and in the School of Culture and Creative Art at the University of Glasgow in Scotland (2006-2014).
A writer and educator, Katie is an Associate Professor of English at UVM. In 2011 she was awarded a UK Arts and Humanities Research Fellowship during which time she wrote Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories (Routledge 2013). The book is a comparative feminist study of performance and examines the cultural and political intersections of African-American and Irish artists, activists and movements from 1845-2005. In 2014, Kinship and Performance won the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). In 2017, “The Art of the Loop: Analogy, Aurality, History, Performance” (TDR 2016) was awarded the Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize from ASTR & The Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History at UT-Austin.
Her next book, _Theatre & the Threshold of Death_ was published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama as part of the Thinking Through Theatre series in January 2024.
FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS & AWARDS (since 2010)
• Humanities Center Faculty Fellow, UVM Humanities Center, 2021-22
• Scholar Teacher Award 2020-21, College of Arts & Sciences, UVM, Awarded 12 May 2020; Lecture 17 Feb 2021.
The Scholar Teacher Award honors faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences who have consistently demonstrated the ability to translate their professional knowledge and skills into exciting classroom experiences for their students. They are faculty who meet the challenge of being both excellent teachers and highly respected professionals in their own disciplines.
• Contemplative Faculty Fellow 2020-21, UVM Contemplative Faculty Learning Community, Awarded 10 June 2020
• Small Grant Research Award ($3000), for Archival Research at the Live Art Development Agency, London (Feb 2019), UVM College of Arts & Sciences, Awarded February 6, 2018
• Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize for “The Art of the Loop: Analogy, Aurality, History, Performance” (TDR 2016), American Society for Theatre Research & Brockett Center for Theatre History & Criticism, UT-Austin, Awarded November 18, 2017
• Lattie F. Coor Programming Grant in the Arts & Humanities ($2500) to help fund UVM Theatre Symposium 2018, Theatre & Performance Studies: New Millennium Pedagogies, Awarded October 2017
• UVM Humanities Center and OVPR Summer Research Award ($7K), for Research and Development of Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Awarded April 2017
• Vermont Artists’ Space Grant, Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, for staged reading of Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués (Summer 2017), Awarded January 2017
• UVM Office of the Vice President for Research Express Award ($3K), For Research in the Eleonora Duse Special Collection at the University of Glasgow (May-June 2016), Awarded November 2015
• Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre, American Society for Theatre Research for Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories (Routledge 2013), Awarded November 2014
• Scottish Crucible Fellow (30 fellows selected from across Scotland for collaborations in science, technology & the arts), 2013
• Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Fellowship, UK, Principal Investigator (£42K), 2011edit
On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer;... more
On the eve of a global pandemic, Kathleen Gough, a theatre professor, becomes immersed in the lives of five artist-mystics, each of whom is a pioneer in her field: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the first known musical composer; Eleanora Duse (1858-1924), the first modern actor in the Western world; Simone Weil (1909-1943), philosopher, activist, and mystic, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time”; Marina Abramovic (b. 1946), “the grandmother of performance art”; and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), the first known (and belatedly acknowledged) abstract painter. Each time Gough crosses a threshold into their world, she is compelled to attend courses, seminars and workshops that are simultaneously about dying and healing.
Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.
Curious to learn more about the relationships between art practice, dying, and healing, Gough imagines the five artists as wisdom teachers in a mystery school. In a series of eight lectures, she turns to performance theory to provide a framework for engaging with the unknown world. In Theatre and the Threshold of Death, Gough makes a persuasive argument for the world-making power of relational thinking in our increasingly polarized age.
Research Interests: Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Humanities, End Of Life Studies, Interdisciplinarity, and 14 moreDramaturgy, Death & Dying (Thanatology), Liminality, Simone Weil, Hildegard von Bingen, Theatre Theory, Eleonora Duse, Mundus Imaginalis, Transgenerational Trauma, Liberal Arts Education, Afterlife, Grief and Loss, Hilma af Klint, and Marina Abramovic
In 2014 Kinship and Performance was given the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre from the American Society for Theatre Research. Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an... more
In 2014 Kinship and Performance was given the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship in African American Theatre from the American Society for Theatre Research.
Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in transnational, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements.
Gough approaches her subject via five key "flashpoints" in Black/Green relations, moving from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. In turn, each of these is related to mediums of performance that were prevalent at the time, such as abolitionist oratory and melodrama, photography and tableaux, architecture and folk drama, television and political demonstrations, and visual art and dramaturgy.
By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston, and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical "characters," this book explores how a transmedial investigation of gender, community, and performance allows for a revision of historiography in Atlantic studies, while the study itself revises and reimagines key concepts central to performance studies.
Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in transnational, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements.
Gough approaches her subject via five key "flashpoints" in Black/Green relations, moving from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. In turn, each of these is related to mediums of performance that were prevalent at the time, such as abolitionist oratory and melodrama, photography and tableaux, architecture and folk drama, television and political demonstrations, and visual art and dramaturgy.
By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston, and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical "characters," this book explores how a transmedial investigation of gender, community, and performance allows for a revision of historiography in Atlantic studies, while the study itself revises and reimagines key concepts central to performance studies.
Research Interests: Irish Studies, Gender Studies, Theatre History, Dramaturgy, Slavery, and 15 moreFeminism, Performance Theory, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Black Atlantic studies, Great Irish Famine, Daniel O'Connell, Lady Gregory, Theater and Performance Studies, Ida B. Wells, Blackface Minstrelsy, Melodrama & Culture, Melodrama and Performance, Maud Gonne, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett
The dramaturgical aesthetic of recent postdramatic performance returns to medieval representational modes: an eye can be used as an ear, and vision can be orchestrated like the auditory space of simultaneous relations. Whether an... more
The dramaturgical aesthetic of recent postdramatic performance returns to medieval representational modes: an eye can be used as an ear, and vision can be orchestrated like the auditory space of simultaneous relations. Whether an immersive, site-specific, one-to-one, or digital/new media performance, such performance has no one point of view, no “one” in control; success or failure is largely determined by individual and collective will. Closing the loop means beginning, again, in non-Euclidian space.
Research Interests: Performance Studies, Postdramatic theatre, Algorithmic Composition, Dramaturgy, Auditory Culture, and 15 moreSound studies, Byzantine Iconography, Digital and Analog Communication, John Cage, Pythagoras, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sacred Geometry, Theatre Historiography, Music and Mathematics, Theater and Performance Studies, History of medieval mathematics, Theater Historiography, Mathematics, Music, Architecture and Fibonnacci Sequence, Geometry Music Mathematics, and William Basinski
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TDR (2012) In the 1890s Aby Warburg began to articulate a theory of performance that he called the "Pathos Formula." He conceptualized this formula around the figure-of-woman-inmovement — "Nympha." The "Nympha" occupies the same place in... more
TDR (2012) In the 1890s Aby Warburg began to articulate a theory of performance that he called the "Pathos Formula." He conceptualized this formula around the figure-of-woman-inmovement — "Nympha." The "Nympha" occupies the same place in Warburg's theory as "strips of film/strips of behavior" does in Richard Schechner's "Restoration of Behavior." Warburg's Nympha illuminates how the invocation of film strips as culturally neutral inflected performance studies from the outset with a gendering that has been reflected and contested ever since.
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This piece is part of Imagined Theatres' rolling Emergency Issue (1000 words). https://imaginedtheatres.com/the-age-of-duse/ In this short creative piece I engage with the current cultural, political and biological emergencies by... more
This piece is part of Imagined Theatres' rolling Emergency Issue (1000 words). https://imaginedtheatres.com/the-age-of-duse/
In this short creative piece I engage with the current cultural, political and biological emergencies by returning to the early twentieth century and exploring a similar set of concerns through the iconic career of Eleonora Duse, the birth of cinema, WWI and the pandemic of 1918.
In this short creative piece I engage with the current cultural, political and biological emergencies by returning to the early twentieth century and exploring a similar set of concerns through the iconic career of Eleonora Duse, the birth of cinema, WWI and the pandemic of 1918.
Research Interests: Theatre Studies, Death, Performance Studies, Italian Cinema, Italian Theatre, and 13 moreActing, Medieval Art, Eleonora Duse, Cinema Studies, Death and Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, Tragedy, Italy - World War 1, Performative Writing, Fin-de-Siècle Culture, Liminal Space, Duende, 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic, and Quem Quaeritis
Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués is part monologue, part comedy, part detective story, and part history lesson and follows the story of theatre professor who makes an appointment with a therapist. What ensues is a sonic and surrealistic... more
Coracles, Castanets, Cadaqués is part monologue, part comedy, part detective story, and part history lesson and follows the story of theatre professor who makes an appointment with a therapist. What ensues is a sonic and surrealistic autobiographical tale of lost orientation, and of learning to turn an eye into an ear in order to hear the ways that our own darkness is looped with our grandest understanding of love. Oh, and there’s a tiger.
https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/124/176
https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/124/176
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Review of "Home Stornoway" for Inauguration of National Theatre of Scotland, Lewis & Harris, Outer Hebrides, 2006
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This keynote takes the form of a performance score that begins with the singular event of 1916 and the 200+ year durational “non-event” that goes by the short hand Magdalene Laundries singing an asynchronous duet. In this “score” I will... more
This keynote takes the form of a performance score that begins with the singular event of 1916 and the 200+ year durational “non-event” that goes by the short hand Magdalene Laundries singing an asynchronous duet. In this “score” I will both demonstrate and narrate the processes by which we might start to answer how one may include the hidden voices of 1916 in national narratives, and articulate these sonic, vocal histories with the stories of the nation and its people in the image-laden world of 2016. How might crossing our senses – where we train ourselves to see with our ears and hear with our eyes – contribute to the making of more humane and equitable homes? Instead of providing definitive answers, I take seriously the question of “How?” as in a “How to…” guide that is intended to speak to our work on the stage and as critical writers, researchers and teachers. In this collectively imagined oratorio-turned-guide-book (provisionally entitled A Home-Makers Guide to the Twenty-First Century) we will pay careful attention to the differences that emerge when histories are narrated like images on a film strip versus histories that operate like a sound loop. In doing so we can reflect on how seeing in auditory space – on scoring our historical consciousness – changes the past itself.
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This invited talk was a part of THE INTERIOR: ART, SPACE & PERFORMANCE. Under the leadership of the Bern Institute of Art History, the Sinergia project “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)”, funded by... more
This invited talk was a part of THE INTERIOR: ART, SPACE & PERFORMANCE.
Under the leadership of the Bern Institute of Art History, the Sinergia project “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) over the period from March 2012 to February 2016, is conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne. Directed by five art historians and one theatre historian, the six subprojects investigate diverse models, concepts, and interpretations of interiors in art, architecture, theatre and visual culture from the Early Modern to the Contemporary eras. Proceeding from a heterogeneous and dynamic concept of the interior drawn from various media, styles, and contexts, new questions will emerge simultaneously engaging various disciplines.
* Do not cite without permission of the author
Under the leadership of the Bern Institute of Art History, the Sinergia project “The Interior: Art, Space, and Performance (Early Modern to Postmodern)”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) over the period from March 2012 to February 2016, is conducted in collaboration with the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre, University of Cologne. Directed by five art historians and one theatre historian, the six subprojects investigate diverse models, concepts, and interpretations of interiors in art, architecture, theatre and visual culture from the Early Modern to the Contemporary eras. Proceeding from a heterogeneous and dynamic concept of the interior drawn from various media, styles, and contexts, new questions will emerge simultaneously engaging various disciplines.
* Do not cite without permission of the author
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Invited Keynote Speaker, “Between the Words: Zora Neale Hurston’s Syncopated Rhythm and Tender Mapping,” Sound/Thought Symposium, The Arches, Glasgow 2 March 2012
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Invited Speaker, Roundtable on theatre, performance and celebrity in the early modern and modern Anglo-Atlantic world; in honour of the John Edward Taylor Visiting Fellow, Professor Joseph Roach (Yale), University of Manchester, 10 March... more
Invited Speaker, Roundtable on theatre, performance and celebrity in the early modern and modern Anglo-Atlantic world; in honour of the John Edward Taylor Visiting Fellow, Professor Joseph Roach (Yale), University of Manchester, 10 March 2011
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Invited Keynote Speaker, “Jumping Scales in Performance Studies: thinking through the nature-culture Divide,” Greening the Future of Live Performance, Public Arts Initiative on Performance and Ecology, School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon... more
Invited Keynote Speaker, “Jumping Scales in Performance Studies: thinking through the nature-culture Divide,” Greening the Future of Live Performance, Public Arts Initiative on Performance and Ecology, School of Drama, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, 26 March 2009
https://www.cmu.edu/cas/events/2008-09/spring/greening-performance.html
https://www.cmu.edu/cas/events/2008-09/spring/greening-performance.html
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This invited lecture was given to students at THE IRISH SEMINAR, Dublin, Summer 2007
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In Fall 2020, I launched a series of Zoom conversations called “Being Liminal: Conversations about the Space In Between." You can find information about the conversations and links to youtube recordings on this FaceBook page:... more
In Fall 2020, I launched a series of Zoom conversations called “Being Liminal: Conversations about the Space In Between." You can find information about the conversations and links to youtube recordings on this FaceBook page: https://www.facebook.com/beingliminal
Conversation #1: Being Liminal with Vermont Artistic Directors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk0WLKX_lQI&feature=youtu.be
Conversation #2: Education and the Art of Healing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K70ldx7zX-4&feature=youtu.be
Conversation #1: Being Liminal with Vermont Artistic Directors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk0WLKX_lQI&feature=youtu.be
Conversation #2: Education and the Art of Healing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K70ldx7zX-4&feature=youtu.be