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lnielsen@macalester.edu
Title: Assistant Professor
Courses Taught: Introduction to Theatre Studies, Sources of Global Performance, Performance Studies Praxis, Performance Theory Seminar, Latin American Theatre and Film, The Oral History Project, Performance/Document/Rights, Feminist Theatres, Theatre and Performance in the Twin Cities
Areas of Special Interest and Training: Performance Studies; Critical Theory; Diasporic Latin@ Studies; Gender and Feminist Studies; Globalization and Cultural studies; Orality, Ethnography, and Multimedia Documentary Methodologies; and Avant-Garde Events
Lara D. Nielsen completed her M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University. Professor Nielsen taught in the Department of Drama at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts for over four years as a member of the Theatre Studies faculty. Lara is currently researching performances in theatre and dance that find ways to document issues in culture and rights managements, highlighting oral history narratives, and the fictions of collective memory.
She is also finishing her first book, Sacrifice Plays: Dominican Performance in Major League Beisbol. Any focus on the mobility of labor servicing the performances of the MLB entertainment industry since the 1960s highlights the importance of talent recruitment from the Dominican Republic. This book examines how the work of performance in commercial sport cultures such as MLB continues and challenges the intransigent work of cultural and economic nationalism in an era of neoliberal managements.
Publications:
“Working the Field with Oral History: Talking Towards the Research Encounter in
Theatre and Performance Studies,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Fall 2009
"Specters of Exchange: Rights and Resources in Loisaida Liberation Theology Passion Play Performance," Performance Research, special issue edited by Claire MacDonald, 2009
"The Oral History Project: Practice-Based Research in Theatre and Performance" in Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter. Palgrave 2008
“Institutionalizing Ensembles: Thinking Theatre, Performance, and ‘The Law,’” in Law, Culture, and the Humanities Vol. 4, No. 2, 156-178 (2008)
“Globalization and the Work of Theatre” Contemporary Theatre Review v16 n 1, special issue on Theatre and Globalization, February 2006
“Baseball as Cultural Policy: The Law and the Anomaly of Performance,”
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society v 29, 2003
“Garbage, Gone,” Women & Performance September 2002
Reviews:
TDR book review (2007): Tree: belief/culture/balance, by Ralph Lemon
Theater Journal performance review (2005): “Charlie Victor Romeo”
Theatre Journal book review (1996): Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America by Taylor and Villegas, 1994; El Teatro Campesino: Theatre in the Chicano Movement by Broyles-González 1994; Hispanic Theatre in New York by de la Roche 1995
Degrees:
M.A. Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota, with a minor in Feminist and Gender Studies
Ph.D. Performance Studies, New York University
Awards:
Nielsen was previously in the Department of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where she was recognized with the David Payne Carter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2006.
Other:
Professor Nielsen was a Fellow with The Five College's Crossroads in the Studies of the Americas (CISA), where she taught at Hampshire and Amherst Colleges, in Western Massachusetts. In 2006 she was a participant in the Columbia University Oral History Research Institute, and her work with oral history and ethnographic writing is developing in a variety of teaching and research activities in the performing arts. In 2007 and 2008 she was the co-convener of a seminar, "Neoliberalism and Performance in the Global Market," for the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), and she is co-editing a book on Neoliberalism, Theatre, and Performance for 2011.
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Lara nielsen