Carrie Preston

For CV click here

My research and teaching interests include modernist literature, performance, and dance, feminist and queer theory, border studies, and critical forced displacement studies. I have published three monographs: Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011) received the De La Torre Bueno Prize in dance studies. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016) was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association book award. Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theaters of Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024) 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 Deveare Smith’s Notes from the Field (2015) and Claudia Rankine’s The White Card (2019).

My co-edited volume Mexico-US, Serbia-EU Border Lives and Works will be published by Anthem Press in 2025. I am currently working on a biography of the poet Diane Wakoski, as well as a book using literary and humanistic methods to respond to the refugee regime and advocate for the emerging field of critical forced displacement.

I teach courses on border studies, forced displacement, and modernist and contemporary literature, drama, and performance. EN465/665 focuses on the US Southern Border and asks what makes this border so important to US political imaginaries, cultural constructions, and identity performances? Borders studies considers 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. EN 799 A1: Critical Displacement Studies: Palestinian and Jewish Displacement and Diaspora uses the central example of Jewish and Palestinian displacement and diaspora, to explore the emerging field of critical forced displacement studies. We consider efforts by the UNHCR and NGOs to use theater therapy in refugee camps, the work of documentary filmmakers, and the practices and theories of “applied theater” alongside plays, novels, poems, and stories that depict Jewish and Palestinian diaspora. We ask: What are the ethical implications of making art and theater, writing papers, even teaching seminars about the global challenges of forced displacement?

 

Selected publications

Books

Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Mexico-US and Serbia-EU Border Lives and Works (Anthem Press, 2025).

Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Articles and Essays

“Pine Barrens,” in Intercultural Japanese Noh Theatre: Texts and Analyses of English-language Noh, eds. Richard Emmert & Ashley Thorpe (Bloomsbury: Methuen Drama, 2024).

“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 21st 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

“Modernism and Performance: A Conversation with Carrie Preston,” in Modernism on the World Stage, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Vol. 4 Cycle 3 (Oct 15, 2019). https://soundcloud.com/user-341064034-729419482

“Blackfaced at The Blacks: Audience Participation in Jean Genet’s Lessons on Race and Gender,” Modern Drama, 62.1 (2019): 1-22.

“Sweeney Agonistes in Noh Mask: T. S. Eliot, Japanese Noh, and the Fragments of World Drama,” Neohelicon, (online 11 Dec. 2018). 46.1(2019): 97-113

“Hissing, Bidding, and Lynching: Participation in Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon and the Melodramatics of American Racism,” The Drama Review, 62.4 (2018): 64-80.

“Translation in Noh Time,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Vol. 3 Cycle 3 (Aug 20, 2018), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/translation-noh-time

“Chapter 8. Dance,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernist Cultures, ed. Celia Marshik (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 128-144.

“Modernism’s Dancing Marionettes: Oskar Schlemmer, Michel Fokine, and Ito Michio,” Modernist Cultures 9.1 (2014): 115-133.

“Michio Ito’s Shadow: Searching for the Transnational in Solo Dance,” in On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Formation of the Modern Dance Canon, eds. Claudia Gitelman & Barbara Palfy (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012): 7-30.

“Taking Direction from Beckett: Noh/No, Footfalls/Pas,” in Back to the Beckett Text, ed. Tomasz Wiśniewski (Gdansk: University of Gdansk Press, 2012): 155-78.

“Joyce’s Reading Bodies and the Kinesthetics of the Modernist Novel,” Twentieth-Century Literature    55.2 (2009): 232-254.

“Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film,” Theatre Journal 61.2 (2009): 213-233.

“The Motor in the Soul: Isadora Duncan and Modernist Performance,” Modernism/modernity 12:2 (2005): 273-289.

Fellowships and Awards

• Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Grant
• The United Methodist Church Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award (2015)
• The Frank and Lynne Wisneski Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences (2013)
• De La Torre Bueno Prize, for a book on dance (2012)
• Boston University Humanities Foundation, Junior Faculty Fellowship (2010–2011)
• The Peter Paul Career Development Professorship (2007–2010)
• Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research Grant (2009)
• The Excellence in Student Advising Award (2008)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar Grant (Dublin 2007)