Felicia McCarren

A cultural historian and performance theorist, Felicia is the author of four books: Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine (Stanford University Press, Writing Science Series, 1998); Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford 2003); French Moves; The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013), awarded the De la Torre Bueno Prize by the Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Outstanding Publication of the Year 2014 from the Congress on Research in Dance. Her latest book, One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet; La Source 1866-2014 (Oxford, 2020) explores science, sex and race in four historical performances of an Orientalist, environmental ballet by the Paris Opera’s first archivist.

A member of the Seminar in the Cultural History of Dance at EHESS, Felicia has been a resident Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Paris and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. She served as the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Spring 2023 and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford (2022-23). At Tulane, she co-founded the Spain-Morocco Confluences summer study abroad program, and regularly teaches courses in French and Moroccan cinema and comparative cultural studies. Her current project is an archival transnational history of modernist performance.