ANTHEA KRAUT (She/Her/Hers)
Professor

Anthea Kraut is Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies.  Her first book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008, and received a Special Citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars’ de la Torre Bueno Prize® for distinguished book of dance scholarship.  Her second book, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press and won the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2016 Outstanding Book Award, the Congress on Research in Dance’s Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, the 2016 Biennial Sally Banes Publication Award from the American Society for Theatre Research, the 2017 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, and Honorable Mention for the American Society for Theatre Research’s Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.  She is currently working on a project on dance-ins (dancing stand-ins) in Hollywood musicals.  Kraut’s articles and essays have been published in the edited volumes The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reeanctment, The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, and Worlding Dance, and in The International Journal of Screendance, Arts, Theatre Journal, Dance Research Journal, Women & Performance: a  journal of feminist theory, The Scholar & Feminist Online, and Theatre Studies. Her teaching interests include U.S. dance history, critical race theory, and methods and theories of dance studies.

PUBLICATIONS

Books
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Articles and Essays
“Female Surrogate Labor and White Corporeal Debt in Singin’ in the Rain,” Camera Obscura 107, Volume 36, Number 2 (2021): 1-31.

“The Hollywood Dance-In: Abstract and Material Relations of Corporeal Reproduction,” Arts 8.4, 133 (2019).

“The Dance-in and the Re/production of White Corporeality,” International Journal of Screendance 10 (2019).

“Reenactment as Racialized Scandal,” in The Oxford Handbook of Danced Reenactment, ed. Mark Franko, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 355-373.

“Fixing Improvisation: Copyright and African American Vernacular Dancers in the Early Twentieth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, ed. George Lewis and Ben Piekut, Oxford University Press, 2016.

“White Womanhood, Property Rights, and the Campaign for Choreographic Copyright: Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance,” Dance Research Journal 43.1 (summer 2011): 3-26.

‘Stealing Steps’ and Signature Moves: Embodied Theories of Dance as Intellectual Property, Theatre Journal 62.2 (May 2010): 173-89.

“Race-ing Choreographic Copyright,” in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh Foster, series eds. Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 76-97.

“Whose Choreography? Josephine Baker and the Question of (Dance) Authorship,” The Scholar & Feminist Online, 6.1-6.2 (fall 2007/winter 2008).

“Recovering Hurston, Reconsidering the Choreographer,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 16.1 (March 2006): 71-90.

“Everybody’s Fire Dance: Zora Neale Hurston and American Dance History,” S&F Online, 3.2 (winter 2005).

“Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55.3 (October 2003): 433-450.

“Re-scripting Origins: Zora Neale Hurston’s Staging of Black Vernacular Dance,” in emBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Alison Goeller and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Hamburg: Lit-Verlag, 2001, pp. 59-77.

“Reclaiming the Body: Representations of Black Dance in Three Plays by Zora Neale Hurston,” Theatre Studies 43 (1998): 23-36.

Essays on “Chicago Opera Ballet,” “Jazz Dance,” and “Tap,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Essays on Jan Erkert, Martha Clarke, Carolyn Brown, and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, in International Dictionary of Modern Dance, Detroit: St. James Press, 1998.

FELLOWSHIPS

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2023
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 2022
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2012
University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2005-06.
Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, University of California Humanities Research Institute, 2002-03.
Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, spring 2002.