NCID-1164
Petra Kuppers
Professor of English Language and Literature, Professor of Women's Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, Professor of Art, Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design and Professor of Theatre and Drama, School of Music, Theatre & Dance
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Performance Studies and Feminist Theory (Falmouth College of Arts)
About
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a professor at the University of Michigan where she teaches in performance studies and disability studies. She is a first generation academic, identifies as queer and disabled, and grew up in Germany. She leads The Olimpias, an international performance research collective. Her Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011) explores The Olimpias' arts-based research methods. Her Theatre & Disability (2017) offers a snapshot of the field, and Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (2014) offers practical exercises for classrooms and studios. Her previous books engaged community performance, medical performances, and somatics, and her current research focuses on speculative modes in performance and creative writing.
Current Work
Dr. Kuppers is working on a book called Eco/Soma: Speculative Experiments in Performance. Eco Soma is a book about ecopoetic disability culture perspectives which makes contributions to emerging discourses in environmental thought and disability culture, and to performance as a research methodology. It shows how we can think about somatic agency in times of global helplessness and the contemporary social justice reorientation of art and culture politics.
Research Area Keyword(s)
disability studies, horror, performance studies, site-specific practices