Carrie Preston

Research Areas: Modernist literature; performance and dance; feminist and queer theory; critical theories of race; critical displacement studies

My first book, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance, was released in Oxford University Press’s Modernist Literature and Culture Series in 2011 and received the De La Torre Bueno Prize in dance studies. The book examines modernist solos in modern dance, film, and poetic recitation and the subjectivities they construct; it includes case studies of Isadora Duncan and H.D. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) examines the influence of Japanese noh drama on international modernist theater, poetry, and dance with chapters on W. B. Yeats, Ito Michio, Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin Britten, and Samuel Beckett. My research was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship, which enabled me to study noh performance technique in Tokyo and conduct research in Ireland and England. A website supplementing Learning to Kneel features performance clips, chapter summaries, and pedagogical activities.

My most recent book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice, examines the political and pedagogical work of audience participation, with studies of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon, the 2016 Broadway plays Shuffle Along and Hamilton, Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field, and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card. While audience participation is often celebrated as politically engaged and transformative, I consider its place in an experience economy that can release the pressure to participate in other movements for racial justice.

I teach courses on drama and performance, feminist, gender, and queer theory, forced displacement and migration. Border Studies considers the US southern border to explore the critical field of border studies, which has emerged since the 1980’s as an interdisciplinary field that examines how cultural practices create borders as spaces that: negotiate between national/cultural belonging and exclusion; question state sovereignty, security, and exceptionalism; and inspire creative literary and activist projects. I also teach interdisciplinary courses on the refugee crisis and other global challenges and the emerging field of critical displacement studies.

Selected publications

Books

• Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice; (Oxford University Press 2024).
• The Lines they Draw: US and EU Border Externalization Regimes (forthcoming with Anthem Press)
• Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)
• Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011

Articles and Essays

• “Shuffle Along (1921) and the Challenges of Black Modernist Performance on the Contemporary Stage,” in Edinburgh Companion to Modernist Drama as Contemporary Theatre, ed. Claire Warden, 2023.
• “Honors Liberal Arts for the 21^st Century,” in A Comprehensive Guide to Honors Colleges, ed. Richard Badenhausen (National Collegiate Honors Council, 2023).
• “The Humanities of Migration and Health,” in Migration and Health, eds. Sandro Galea, Catherine Ettman, and Muhammad Zaman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
• “Participation, Pandemic, and the Pucker in Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge” in Taylor Mac, eds. Sean Edgecomb & David Román (University of Michigan Press, 2022).
• “Ozu’s A Story of Floating Weeds and the Art of Being Behind,” in A Modernist Cinema, eds. Scott Klein & Michael Valdez Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
• “Ezra Pound as Noh Student: The Lessons of Hagoromo’s Angel,” Approaches to Teaching Pound, eds. Ira Nadel & Demetres Tryphonopoulos (Modern Language Association, 2021).
• “Teaching ‘Problematic’ Yeats: Relevance without Recuperation,” International Yeats Studies 4.1 (2020): 1-14.
•  “Gender and Sexuality,” in The New Ezra Pound Studies, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge University Press, 2019): 196-207.
• “Fluidity,” in Reading “The Waste Land” with the #MeToo Generation, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Vol. 4 Cycle 4 (Mar 4, 2019). https://modernismmodernity.org/user/394
• “Hissing, Bidding, and Lynching: Participation in Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon and the Melodramatics of American Racism,” The Drama Review, 2018.
• “Sweeney Agonistes in Noh Mask: T. S. Eliot, Japanese Noh, and the Fragments of World Drama,” Neohelicon, 2018.
• “Gender and Sexuality,” in The New Ezra Pound, ed. Mark Byron (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018).
• “Translation in Noh Time,” Modernism/modernity, 2018.
• “Joyce’s Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel,” in Twentieth-Century Literature (55.2, Summer 2009)
• “Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film,” in Theatre Journal (61.2, 2009)
• “The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance,” in Modernism/modernity (12:2, 2005)