NU Performance Studies

Deadline extended !!!!!
Don’t miss this amazing opportunity to think with these great scholars!

Northwestern’s Department of Performance Studies and Slippage Lab invites applications from graduate students and recent graduates on the theme of Black Q***r Aesthetics for our 2026 Performance Studies Summer Institute. Check out the flyer for more information!

Application Deadline May 17!! The Department of Performance Studies and Slippage Lab invite applications from graduate students and recent graduates on the theme of Black Q***r Aesthetics for our
2026 Performance Studies Summer Institute.

TODAY!
MONDAY May 4th, 12:30-1:50pm
Filling The Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic
A Talk with Rayya El Zein

Presented by
The Department of Performance Studies, co-sponsored by the MENA program
free & open to the public!

Zoom link in. Bio

Mark your calendars!!! This week .nu

SLIPPAGE Black Performance Theory 2026 lecture series continues with more exciting conversations!
THURSDAY, APRIL 30 @ 5:30 PM
Henry Castillo (Northwestern University) and Luis Alba (NYU)
FRIDAY, MAY 1 @ 12:30 PM
Thomas F. DeFrantz (Northwestern) and Kevin E. Quashie (Brown University)

For more information, check the flyer!!! See you All There !

Taking Sides with the Neutral International Conference
April 23-24, 2026
Northwestern University (Evanston)
Annie May Swift Auditorium
Participants:
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Ryan Dohoney
Matthieu Dupas
Scott Durham
David Halperin
Hélène Merlin-Kajman
Laurie Laufer
Augustin Leroy
Maïté Marciano
George-Henri Melenotte
Nasrin Qader
Gérald Sfez
Domietta Torlasco
Marie-Claire Vallois
Roland Barthes defined the Neutral as that which eludes the paradigm, that which “suspends meaning in favor of the sign.”
With the spread of French Theory across American campuses, the “thought of the Neutral” has continued to circulate and reinvent itself. In q***r theory, performance blurs the binary structure of gender. In Black theory, fugitivity escapes dominant categories through a fluidity of meaning.
Nearly fifty years after Barthes’s course at the Collège de France, in the wake of , when egalitarian gender civility is imagined, trigger warnings proliferate, and neutral or inclusive pronouns circulate widely, a desire for the Neutral has emerged. Through intellectual and aesthetic experiments, invited scholars across gender, sexuality, race, literature, psychoanalysis, language, cinema, music, and dance will help us attune to the Neutral and the novelty it brings.

The conference is a collaborative initiative between the Department of French and Italian and the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern, as well as the Mouvement Transitions in partnership with Université Paris-VIII - Vincennes - Saint-Denis and Northwestern University. It is co-sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, SLIPPAGE, and others.
We hope that many of you will join us.

Join Performance Studies, MENA Studies, MSA, and MENA-SA next week for a lecture 🤓 and live dance lesson 💃 on Syrian 🇸🇾 dabka. Light refreshments ☕️🍰 will be served after. RSVP on ‘Cats on Campus.
Link: https://cglink.me/23r/r376218

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd @ 3:30 pm

A talk by Christipher B. Patterson!!!

This talk reflects on acts of writing in times of grief, disillusionment, and emerging fascism.
Crowe Hall, 1132 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208.
Open to all students! Lunch served @ 11:30am -2:00 pm

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd @ 3:30 pm A talk by Christipher B. Patterson!!!

This talk reflects on acts of writing in times of grief, disillusionment, and emerging fascism.
Crowe Hall, 1132 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208.
Open to all students! Lunch served @ 11:30am -2:00 pm

Student Spotlight !

Congratulations are in orders for 3rd year Performance Studies Student Marsae Lynette who recently received a Fulbright award to Trinidad and Tobago for the 2026-2027 academic year!!!! 🧡🧡🧡

Marsae Lynette
Marsae Lynette is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and scholar pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, with a focus in environmental humanities and policy. Her research and creative practice center Afro-diasporic and Indigenous ecological performance through ritual, cultural memory, environmental justice, and the choreopoem form. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. Marsae’s choreography and movement cinema have been featured in academic conferences, festivals, and productions such as “Hastings Street” at the Detroit Music Hall and “Magnolia Ballet” at Williamston Theatre. She has taught for institutions including Interlochen Center for the Arts. Currently the graduate assistant for the Black Arts Consortium in Chicago, she is also a member of the NU Abolitionist Lab and founding member of the Aarcc Coalition. Recipient of the Kresge Gilda Snowden Award and New Waves TT Artist Residency, Marsae’s work cultivates ecological empathy and collective action for a sustainable and just future.

Mark your calendars !!!!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22nd @ 5pm

A talk by Rosemary Candelario!!!

The talk focuses on late 20th and early 21st century theatrical and protest performances about abortion in the United States that are not normally taken seriously in the political arena.

mark your calendars for all the exciting things going on with The 2025 Wallace Bacon Residency, featuring Yaa Samar! Dance Theater, with a dabble workshop on TUESDAY, APRIL 7 @ 5pm! and artist talk on WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8th @ noon!

All events free and open to the public !