New Books in Performing Arts Podcast
1) Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley
With his fake beard, putty nose, and thick Yiddish accent, the “stage Jew” was once a common character in vaudeville, part of a genre that mocked immigrants and minorities. Essentially a variant of bl...Show More
2) Jessica Clarke, "A New History of Ancient Roman Theatre" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
"Roman theatre" is a term often used to describe the theatre of ancient Italy during the second and third century BCE. Plautus and Terence are referred to as ‘Roman playwrights,’ and Rome itself is ge...Show More
3) Karen Schupp and Sherrie Barr eds., "Stories We Dance / Stories We Tell: Essays on Dance in Higher Education" (McFarland, 2025)
Higher education continually mediates long standing traditions while seeking new ways of thinking, creating a quiet tension as institutions respond to shifting and multiple socio-cultural values. Danc...Show More
4) Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
In Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640: Negotiating the Steps of Faith (Boydell & Brewer, 2022) Dr. Lynneth Miller Renberg presents a lively exploration of the medieval and early m...Show More
5) Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)
Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (Orient BlackSwan, 2024) by Sourit Bhattacharya introduces a new method of decolonial reading and criticism. It critically examines the history a...Show More
6) Matti Friedman, "Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai" (Spiegel & Grau, 2022)
In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of ...Show More
7) Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it r...Show More
8) Hilary French, "Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
In the early twentieth century, American ragtime and the Parisian tango fuelled a dancing craze in Britain. Public ballrooms were built throughout the country, providing a glamorous setting for dancin...Show More
9) Polina Dimova, "At the Crossroads of the Senses: The Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Inspired by Richard Wagner’s idea of the total artwork, European modernist artists began to pursue multimedia projects that mixed colors, sounds, and shapes. Dr. Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of t...Show More
10) Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueli...Show More