Natalie Zervou
(Associate Professor, Dance Department)
Congratulations to Associate Professor Natalie Zervou on her new book, Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity (Studies in Dance: Theories and Practices, University of Michigan Press, 2024) published in 2024, which received the De la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association
Natalie Zervou is an Associate Professor in Dance at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She holds a PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Her work focuses on the intersection between dance practices and the socio-political sphere and particularly on the interplay between dance and crises. Her first book Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity (University of Michigan Press 2024) received the de la Torre Bueno Prize® from the Dance Studies Association in 2025 and explored the ways that dancing bodies negotiate national identity construction in the fluctuating landscape of the socio-political and economic crisis in Greece. Zervou’s current research pairs Dance Studies with Horror Studies to explore bodies in extreme states of crises, such as those proposed in horror films or live performances experimenting with grotesque aesthetics. Her article “Dancing with/the Monster: Coming of Age, Female Sexuality, and Healing through Monstrosity” is featured in the essay anthology Monstrous Utopias: Performance and the Radical Possibility of Hope (Routledge 2026).
Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity
Performing the Greek Crisis explores the impact of the Greek financial crisis (2009–19) on the performing arts sector in Greece, and especially on contemporary concert dance. When Greece became the first European Union member to be threatened with default, the resulting budget cuts pushed dance to develop in unprecedented directions. The book examines the repercussions that the crisis had on artists’ daily lives and experiences, weaving the personal with the political to humanize a phenomenon that, to date, had been examined chiefly through economic and statistical lenses. Informed by the author’s experience of growing up in Greece and including interviews and rich descriptions of performances, the book offers a glimpse into a pivotal moment in Greek history.
In Greece, dance (and, by extension, the body) has historically held a central role in the process of national identity construction. When the crisis broke out, artists had to navigate through a precariously fluctuating landscape, with their bodies as their only stable referent. By centering the analysis of the Greek crisis on the dancing bodies, Performing the Greek Crisis is able to examine the various ways that artists reconceptualized their history and reframed ideas of national belonging, race, citizenship, and immigration.
Affiliate Faculty Accomplishments
Please join us in celebrating recent work by our faculty affiliates.
(Listed in alphabetical order by faculty last name)
Gudrun Bühnemann published a new book titled Scholar, Serpent, Yogin, and Devotee: The Many Faces of Patañjali in Indian Traditions (Brill, 2025).
This study illuminates the many faces of Patañjali in Indian traditions. Often regarded as an incarnation of the cosmic serpent Ādiśeṣa or Anantanāga, Patañjali is celebrated, in both story and art, as a grammarian, scholar and practitioner of yoga, physician-alchemist, medical authority, teacher, ascetic, and devotee of the Dancing Śiva (Naṭarāja).
Gudrun Bühnemann is a Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Culture.
Kelley Conway and Eric Hoyt received the 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Best Edited Collection Award for their edited volume Global Movie Magazine Networks (University of California Press, 2025).
This groundbreaking collection of essays from leading film historians features original research on movie magazines published in China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Latin America, South Korea, the U.S., and beyond. Vital resources for the study of film history and culture, movie magazines are frequently cited as sources, but rarely centered as objects of study. Global Movie Magazine Networks does precisely that, revealing the hybridity, heterogeneity, and connectivity of movie magazines and the important role they play in the intercontinental exchange of information and ideas about cinema. Uniquely, the contributors in this book have developed their critical analysis alongside the collaborative work of building digital resources, facilitating the digitization of more than a dozen of these historic magazines on an open-access basis.
Eric Hoyt is Kahl Family Professor of Media Production in the Department of Communication Arts.
Kelley Conway is Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts.
Theresa Delgadillo’s book Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas (University of Michigan Press, 2025) received the 16th Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literature and Cultural Studies (2026).
The Modern Language Association awarded its sixteenth Prize in United States Latina and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies to CLS Director Theresa Delgadillo for her 2024 book Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas. The Association’s press release notes that Geographies of Relation “masterfully combines borderlands and diaspora theorizing to read relationally, across minoritized difference, taking an extremely timely approach grounded in women-of-color feminist theory and Latinx and Black studies.” It further praises the study for advancing “relational approaches that challenge nationalism and racial exclusions, proposing ‘looking sideways’ and ‘intersecting diasporas’ as frameworks to achieve ‘new communities of belonging. in the Americas.” The Modern Language Association is the preeminent organization for scholars of language and literature in the United States.
A chapter from this award-winning book was presented at CVCPS Faculty Research Forum in 2025.
Theresa Delgadillo is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of English and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Studies.
Falina Enriquez was recently awarded a Vilas Associate Award.
A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, she studies music and language as an ensemble that helps us understand how people construct the world and emplace themselves—and others—within it.
Falina Enriquez is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a CLS governance faculty member.
Mary Hennessy published a journal article titled ‘Ein altes Thema, neu gesehen’ [An old topic, seen anew]: Remediating Weimar Modernity in Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Großstadtmelodie (1943) in German Studies Review.
This article examines Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s popular film Großstadtmelodie (Metropolitan melody). Released in 1943 but set in 1937–1938, the film repurposes Weimar’s New Woman and prewar newsreel footage of Berlin to transport audiences, especially women on the home front, to interwar Berlin, not only to distract from the war but also to envision a future Berlin that would be achieved only after the war was won. I suggest that remediation in the film works ultimately to counter the aesthetic, social, and historical fragmentation of war, captured by the feminine “melody” of the film’s title and central metaphor.
Mary Hennessy She was also recently awarded a one-semester open topic fellowship, Vanishing Mediators: Work, Gender, and Technology in Weimar Germany, at the Institute for Research in the Humanities for AY 2026-7. Mary Hennessy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+.
Darshana Mini has been selected to receive the Helen Award from the Feminist Communication Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA) for 2026. And her book Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (University of California, 2025) recently received the honorable mention for the MLA Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies.
Darshana Mini is an Associate Professor at Department of Communication Arts and the Director for Media and Gender Justice at 4W Initiative.
Amanda Shubert published a new book titled Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press, 2025).
A cultural history of nineteenth-century media imaginaries, Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies—magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Amanda Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics—an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there.
Amanda Shubert is Teaching Faculty in the Department of English, where she also serves as Educational Innovation Coordinator.