Jean-Marie Apostolidès

Professor, classical and contemporary French theater. Jean-Marie Apostolidès has been teaching at TAPS since 1993. As a playwright, his texts have been produced in France, Canada, and the United States. Over the last twelve years, he has staged a dozen plays at Stanford and in the Bay Area, both classical and contemporary, particularly from the European repertoire. In his productions, he has focused on the notion of mise-en-tableaux, which complements the traditional techniques of mise-en-scène with silent tableaux aimed at visually translating the unconscious of the text analyzed from a theoretical perspective.

Among his books are: Le roi-machine (1981), La nauf des fous (1982), Les métamorphoses de Tintin (1984/2003/2006), Le Prince sacrifié (1985), L'affaire Unabomber (1996), Les tombeaux de Guy Debord (1999/2006), L'audience (2001), Traces, revers, écart (2001), Héroïsme et victimisation (2003/2008), Sade in the Abyss (2003), Tintin et le mythe du surenfant (2003), Cyrano, qui fut tout et qui ne fut rien (2006), Il faut construire l'hacienda (2006), Ivan Chtcheglov, profil perdu (2006), Une volée de Moineaux (2008), in collaboration with Boris Donné for the last two volumes. Also with Boris Donné, he has edited unknown texts related to the Letterist and the Situationist International movements by authors such as Patrick Straram (three volumes) and Ivan Chtcheglov (one volume).

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Jennifer DeVere Brody

Department Chair; Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and Affiliate in the CCSRE; Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Race Theory, Performance Studies. Jennifer DeVere Brody's work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Text and Performance Quarterly and in several edited volumes. Her books, Impossible Purities (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) both discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies and performance. She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC, and curated “Ultra Super” at the Franklin Humanities Center at Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics and subjectivity as well as feminist theory, queer studies and
contemporary cultural studies. Currently, she is working with colleagues the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man and a new book about the intersections of sculpture and performance.

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Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education; Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education; Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts.

Elam is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co‑editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (winner of the 2001 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Theater, American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan. He has also written essays published in several critical anthologies. Elam was the editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. In 2006, Elam was the winner of the Betty Jones Award for Outstanding Teaching from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the winner of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Theatre Research. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006.

At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards: the ASSU Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Small Classes (1992); the Humanities and Sciences Deans Distinguished Teaching Award (1993); the Black Community Service Center Outstanding Teacher Award (1994), the Bing Teaching Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching (1994-1997); and the Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1998).

In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for more than eighteen years. Most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter ofwhich won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards.

Elam received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1978 and his Ph.D, in Dramatic Arts from the University of California-Berkeley in 1984.

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Leslie Hill

Associate Professor, Performance Making. Leslie Hill teaches courses in performance making and critical theory and is co-director of Curious theatre company. Her interests include Live Art, social engagement, activism, phenomenology, autoethnography, film and video in performance, cognitive neuroscience, and science-art collaborations. Her performance work with Curious has been shown in 17 countries, commissioned and produced by organizations such as Artist Links Shanghai, Franklin Furnace, the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, the NEA, Performance Space Sydney, Tanzquartier Vienna, Alfred ve dvoře Prague, Le Couvent des Recollets Paris, the Arts Institue University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Women’s Library and the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. www.placelessness.com

Her articles have appeared in journals such as Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and New Theatre Quarterly. She is co-editor, with Helen Paris, of Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In 2004 she was named a NESTA Dream Time Fellow. Originally from New Mexico, Hill lived in the UK for 20 years where she co-founded Curious theatre company with Helen Paris in 1996. Hill received a double major in English and Philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 1989, an MA from the Shakespeare Institute in 1991, and a PhD in Theatre from the University of Glasgow in 1996.

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Branislav Jakovljevic

Assistant Professor, Avant-garde and Experimental Theater, Performance Theory, Critical Theory . Branislav Jakovljevic joined TAPS in the fall of 2006. His areas of scholarly interests include the avant-garde (across disciplines—theater, literature, visual arts, music—and periods—European avant-gardes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, post-World War II avant-garde in Europe and America), theater history, dramaturgy, performance theory, philosophy of the event, and, most recently, performance and law. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in avant-garde, performance theory, and theater history. He has published essays on a broad variety of subjects, from history of late nineteenth-century theater, to Russian and Soviet avant-garde, to contemporary American experimental performance (The Wooster Group, composer John Adams, the site-specific performance group Skewed Visions). His works have been published in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Theater) and in Europe (Serbia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium). His book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Jakovljevic received his B.A. in Dramaturgy from the School of Theater, Film, Television, and Radio in Belgrade, Serbia, where he also worked professionally in theater as playwright and dramaturg and wrote theater criticism. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.
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Jisha Menon

Assistant Professor, Postcolonial Theory and Performance Studies. Jisha Menon teaches courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory and performance studies. She received her M.A. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence in South Asia, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. She is co-editor, with Patrick Anderson, of a volume of essays, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) that explores the coimbrication of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces. Her book, Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, forthcoming), considers the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while also paying attention to the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also at work on a second project, Pedestrian Acts: Performing the City in Neoliberal Bangalore, which considers new narrations of selfhood that are produced at the intersection of neoliberal state, global market and consumer fantasy.

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Helen Paris

Associate Professor, Performance Making. Helen Paris is an award winning artist who has been making performance work for twenty years. Her research interests include: Live Art, solo performance, autobiography, intimacy and proximity in performance, site specific works, the senses in performance, performance and technology, and audience / performer relationships. She received her doctorate from the University of Surrey in 2000, exploring notions of the virtual and the visceral in live performance. Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals including Performance Research, Women and Performance, Total Theatre, Theatre/Public and Tessera.

She is co-artistic director of Curious theatre company. Her solo performances include Family Hold Back, which has toured extensively in the UK, and internationally, including Sydney Opera House, Guling Street Avant-Garde Theater in Taipei and the Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts, Shanghai. With her company Curious, she has produced over 40 projects in a range of media including live performance, installation and film. The company’s work has been presented and supported by such institutions as the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Institute for Contemporary Art London, the British Council Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival; international conferences such as IETM, PSi and ATHE; and film festivals such as Winterthur, the London Short Film Festival and Hors Pistes at the Pompidou Center. Curious is produced and managed by Artsadmin, London.

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Peggy Phelan

Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English.. Peggy Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2003, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997).

She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. These essays have been cited in the fields of architecture, art history, psychoanalytic criticism, visual culture, performance studies, theater studies, and film and video studies. She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President of Performance Studies International. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and a Guggenheim Fellow.

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Michael Ramsaur

Director of Production; Professor (Teaching), Lighting Design. Michael Ramsaur is a professor at Stanford University serving as Director of Production. In addition to teaching regularly at the Bavarian Theater Academy Munich, he is a guest professor at the University of Arts Belgrade in the Interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Theater, and an honorary professor at the Central Academy of Drama Beijing. He serves as President of OISTAT (the International Association of Scenographers, Theater Architects, and Technicians), and is a long-time active member of USITT, as well as a member of the United Scenic Artist Association (Lighting Design USAA Local #829), the International Alliance Theatrical Stage Employees (Stage Hands IATSE Local #16), the Illumination Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), and the International Association Lighting Designers (IALD). Ramsaur has had a forty-year career in theater including serving as a lighting designer for many theater companies internationally and locally, including Broadway by the Bay, where he is Resident Lighting Designer. Examples of his designs have been displayed at two United States Institute of Theater Technology Design Expositions, a theater design exhibit at the Triton Museum San Jose, and at theatrical design exhibitions in Prague and Shanghai. He has been awarded Outstanding Lighting Design awards from the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Association, Dean Goodman Award, and Drama Logue Award as well as receiving a Fulbright grant. His articles on lighting techniques have been published in three countries and he has created a computerized software program to aid lighting designers.

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Alice Rayner

Professor, critical theory and dramatic literature. Alice Rayner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature and theory. Her research interests include the phenomenology of theater as well as comedy, genre theory, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics in the analysis of texts and performance. Published books include Comic Persuasion (University of California Press), To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (University of Michigan Press) and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Her essays on technology and culture have been included in Discourse as well as in Michal Kobialka’s book, Of Borders and Thresholds, and Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’ Landscape and Theatre. She has written on Harold Pinter for Theatre Journal as well as the collection Harold Pinter at 60 (ed. Katherine Burkman, Indiana). Three essays on Suzan-Lori Parks, co-authored with Harry Elam, have appeared in Theatre Journal as well as in Performing America (ed. Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor) and Staging Resistence (ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer). Also published in Theatre Journal is “Rude Mechanicals and The Specters of Marx,” a theory of practical labor in theater. Other essays include a study of metaphor and performance in Études Théâtrales/Essays in Theatre; on Stanislavksy and A.C. Bradley in Theatre Quarterly, “The Audience...and the Ethics of Listening,” an examination of the responsibilities of an audience; “Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology,” a theory of action derived from Hamlet (both in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism); and “All Her Children: Caryl Churchill’s Furious Ghosts,” a study of the unborn in Churchill’s plays (in Sheila Rabillard’s Essays on Churchill). Her article on stage objects in relation to Heidegger’s essay, The Thing, appears in the collection, Staging Philosophy, (ed. David Krasner and David Saltz, Michigan, 2006). She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Journal. From 1996-99 she was Director of Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Department Chair from 2002-2005.

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Rush Rehm

Professor, classical drama. An actor, director, and professor of Theater & Performance Studies and Classics, Rush Rehm publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. He also serves as Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater, a professional theater that presents a dramatic festival and symposium based on a major playwright each summer.

Rehm’s books include Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Theatre Version (Melbourne 1978); Greek Tragic Theatre (Routledge: London 1992, paper 1994, modern Greek translation 1999); Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Marriage and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 1994, paper 1996); The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2002); and Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth: London 2003). Recent contributions to edited volumes include The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge), Rebel Women (Methuen: London), Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in Performance (Oxford), Sophocles and the Greek Language (Brill: Leiden), Antigone’s Answer (Atlanta), and Post-Colonial Classic (Oxford). As well as courses on ancient theater and culture, Rehm teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism.

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Janice Ross

Dance Division Director (sabbatical); Professor (Teaching), dance history, performance art, postmodern dance. Janice Ross, Professor (Teaching) at TAPS  and Director of the Dance Division at Stanford University, has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. She is the author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, (University of California Press 2007),winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007) and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin 2001).  Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), for The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counter-culture and the Avant-Garde, Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), "Improvisation as Child's Play," in Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, Jacobs' Pillow Research Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.  She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars and a 2010-2011 Fulbright Fellow to Israel.

William Eddelman

Associate Professor Emeritus. William Eddelman has been a set and costume designer and a theater historian for more than forty years. At Stanford he has taught a wide variety of classes which have ranged from design, theater aesthetics, and musical theater to dramatic literature and cultural studies. Recently, he has taught a graduate seminar in international theater aesthetics and an undergraduate seminar called “Mapping and Wrapping the Body: The Psychology of Clothes.” He has taught several classes for Stanford Continuing Studies and in the last two quarters he has given classes on "Venice and the Veneto" and "Paris in the Jazz Age." He has co-led a tour for Stanford Alumni Travel in the Veneto part of Italy with a focus on Palladian Villas, and lead a tour to Venice for carnival.

As a very active board member of the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum (which will be known in the future as the Museum of Performance and Design), Eddelman is involved in advising and purchasing materials for the new museum. He continues to work on a massive postcard collection that focuses on the history of costume, and is structuring a documentation project on the history of the costume and set design work at the Prague Quadrennials. Recently he completed a volume of photographs from nearly forty years ago.

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Helen Schrader

Professor Emerita, group communication. Professor Emerita Schrader taught a course on Group Communication for a wide cross-section of Stanford students during her many years in the Drama Department (now Theater & Performance Studies Department).

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Carl Weber

Professor Emeritus, directing and dramaturgy. Carl Weber, Professor of Directing and Dramaturgy at Stanford, began his career as an actor with the Heidelberg City Theater while completing a B.A. in Philosophy, German, and English Literature at Heidelberg University. In 1949, he was one of the founders of the Heidelberg Zimmertheater and directed the company’s opening production. He moved to Berlin in 1950, joining the company of Theater der Freundschaft, and was invited, in 1952, to join the Berliner Ensemble as an actor, dramaturg, and assistant director to Bertolt Brecht, with whom he worked on the productions of Katzgraben, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Galileo.

After Brecht’s death in 1956, Weber became one of the directors with the company. He co-wrote and directed, with Peter Palitzsch, the play The Day of the Great Scholar Wu, staged a revival of Brecht’s production of Mother Courage, and was one of the directors of Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. He also wrote and edited program brochures and acted in eight of the Ensemble’s productions. 1955-61, Weber directed as well for other theaters, such as Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, and for television (Deutscher Fernsehfunk).

In 1961, Weber staged the West German premiere of Brecht’s Trumpets and Drums at the Lübeck City Theater, and was invited to direct Brecht’s Puntila and his Man Matti at Carnegie Institute of Technology, at Pittsburgh, in 1962. Between 1962 and 1966, he directed at theaters in West Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States, among them the San Francisco’s Actors Workshop, Memphis’ Front St. Theatre, Norway’s National Theatre in Oslo, Denmark’s Aarhus and Aalborg Theatres, and Berlin’s Schaubühne. He also served 1964-66 as principal resident director of Wuppertaler Bühnen, the home of Pina Bausch’s “Tanztheater.”
Weber moved to New York in 1966 when he was appointed Master-Teacher of Directing and Acting at the newly-founded NYU School of the Arts. Subsequently he directed numerous productions in New York and at American regional theatres, such as Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre; Chelsea Theatre Center at B.A.M.; American Place Theatre; Perry St. Theatre; the Martinique; Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; Yale Repertory Theatre; McCarter Theatre, Princeton; and San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Among his productions, besides Brecht plays, were the American premieres of Peter Handke’s Kaspar (the production received two Obies), The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They are Dying Out; of Witkiewicz’s The Waterhen; and the premieres of Ed Bullins’ Jo Anne; W. D. Snodgrass’s Fuehrer Bunker; Mac Wellman’s Starluster and Saul Levitt’s Lincoln. He also directed many classics, among them Molière’s The Miser, Rostand’s Cyrano, H.V. Kleist’s The Broken Pitcher; and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. While based in New York, he continued to direct in Europe: for Zürich Schauspielhaus; München Kammerspiele; Hamburg Schauspielhaus, and Wuppertaler Bühnen. He also staged one of the first Indian Brecht productions, Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1968, at the Asian Theatre Institute, New Delhi. From 1971 to 1983, he chaired the Graduate Directing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1984, he was appointed Professor of Drama (now Theater & Performance Studies) at Stanford University where he heads Ph.D. Directing Studies. He has directed and/or taught at Columbia University, the National Theatre School of Canada at Montreal, U.C.L.A., Princeton University, Temple University, and Justus von Liebing Universität at Giessen. He also lectured and/or conducted workshops at many other American and German universities.

Weber has authored and narrated programs on Brecht and Handke for Camera 3, CBS-TV. His writings have been published in The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Journal, Theater, Theatre Three, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theater Heute, Theater der Zeit, Die Weltbühne, and others. His essays have appeared in the volumes The Director in a Changing Theatre, Master Teachers of Theatre, Szenische Geschichtsdarstellung, Theatre and Film in Exile, Multiculturalism and Performance, Vom Wort zum Bild, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Brecht Unbound, A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, American Dramaturgy, An Introduction to Theatre, Brecht Handbuch, Heiner Müller Handbuch, and Encyclopedia of the 20th Century, among others. He is a co-editor of the Yearbook of the International Brecht Society and of Performing Arts Journal.

Weber translated, edited, and wrote introductions and commentary to four volumes of plays, poetry and prose by Heiner Müller: Hamletmachine, Explosion of a Memory, The Battle, and A Heiner Müller Reader, published by PAJ Publications and Johns Hopkins University Press. He also edited the anthology Dramacontemporary: Germany, Johns Hopkins University Press, for which he wrote introductions and translated several of the plays. His translations of Müller, Manfred Karge, and Gerlind Reinshagen have been widely performed. His translations into German of plays from the English, French, and Russian repertoire were produced at German theaters and radio.

Weber is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and was on its Board, 1980-1986. He is also a member of PEN Club, ATHE, and the International Brecht Society.

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