Performance Studies
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill

Performance Studies is one of 5 undergraduate tracks and an M.A./PhD concentration in the graduate program in the Department of Communication Studies. The Performance Studies faculty is committed to integrating theory and practice; to exploring the connections between performance aesthetics and social dynamics; and to engaging performance in public forums of varying magnitudes. The program supports a full production season, featuring adaptations of literature, ethnography, and oral history directed by faculty and graduate students, often in collaboration with regional companies and/or other units on campus. The area is also committed to community-based work, work that exceeds the formal parameters of the campus stage in its wish to help communities to define themselves.

At the graduate level, the area offers a broad range of courses that emphasize performance as an engaged mode of inquiry and representation inextricable from public service and activism of the highest order. Graduate courses include critical performance ethnography; the performance of memory; performance politics; performance pedagogies; and critical/cultural approaches to performance as well as directing and adaptation. Students are strongly encouraged to work across and between areas and disciplines.

Performance faculty include Paul H. Ferguson, D. Soyini Madison, Della Pollock, and Madeleine Grumet.

For additional information please visit the Department's website.