• Dance

  • Bridget Cauthery

  • Assistant Professor

Bridget Cauthery profile image

E cauthery@yorku.ca
W Personal Website

EDUCATION

PhD Dance Studies (University of Surrey)
MA Dance Ethnology (York University)
BA Hons English, History & Anthropology (University of Toronto)

BIOGRAPHY

Bridget Cauthery (PhD) is a dance and cultural studies scholar focusing on the impacts of post/neo-coloniality and the processes of globalization on contemporary and popular dance practices in the Global North. In June 2022, she embarked on a multi-year SSHRC Insight-funded project to resituate and reinvest in In the Land of the Spirits, a ballet first produced by John Kim Bell (Mohawk) in 1988. The grant will fund a minimum of three Indigenous graduate research assistants in the visual and performing arts and consider the systemic reasons that prevented In the Land of the Spirits from enjoying sustained national and international recognition.

Her first book, Choreographing the North: Settler affinities in contemporary dancemaking, examines eleven contemporary settler dance works that take the Far North as source and inspiration, analyzing the colonial imaginations and long-standing paradigms that Orientalize northern people, lands and narratives. In doing so, her work brings the Nordic theory of arcticism (Ryall et al 2010) into conversation with dance studies.

Together with Jonathan Osborn, Bridget is co-editor of a special issue of the journal PUBLIC entitled “Return to the Body,” a collection of writing and performance art photography that reminds readers to situate the body as a reflexive, knowledge-producing entity that can neither be overlooked nor conceived as secondary, inferior or false.

In addition, recent publications include peer-reviewed chapters on Indigenous and diasporic subjectivities in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2021) and Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada (2021) as well as a review of Immer Collective’s short experimental dance film “100 Years of Cinematic Solitude” for PUBLIC 67 (2023).

Bridget is the founder of the Somatics Working Group at York University, bringing together graduate students, faculty and emerging and established international somatics scholars to disrupt logo- and ocular-centric research and dissertation praxis. In April 2023 she organized a three-day graduate symposium featuring dance scholars engaging with critical race studies from Canada, the United States and Mexico, and which brought together students from Dance and Theatre & Performance Studies. Her successful SSHRC Knowledge Mobilization grant will fund a three-week residency for choreographer Florent Nikiema (Burkino Faso), the screening of Zab Maboungou’s 2023 autobiographical documentary Maboungou: Being in the World, and an artist panel on the future of African diasporic dance practice in Canada.

Professor Cauthery has won two York University awards for her teaching (President’s University-Wide Teaching Award in 2018; AMPD eLearning Award in 2014) and is an active supervisor and committee member of MA and PhD committees in Dance, Theatre & Performance Studies, Anthropology, Education, Communications & Culture, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

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