The new working group in Drama, Theater & Performance Studies seeks to provide a central forum for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and practice at New York University. Bringing together graduate students and faculty from departments and programs across the university, as well as NYC more broadly, this working group will establish a much-needed space for promoting and sharing new work on theater, performance, and dramatic literature.

The principal aim of DTAPS is to provide a space for faculty and graduate students to come together to share and present research, by highlighting different disciplinary approaches to performance, while also creating a supportive scholarly community around this rapidly evolving field. Their task is to forge a space of collaboration, exchange, support, and debate. 

In addition to providing a necessary forum for our NYU community, there is also an urgent need for a downtown location for artists and scholars in and around the city to gather and share their work. Through scholarly lectures, guest artist talks, and performance visits, the working group will take advantage of New York City’s vast performing arts landscape to publicly consider the role of performance research in the context of our city’s history and politics.

Egnlish Dept. Professor Brandon Woolf is one of the co-convenors, along with Alisa Zhulina (NYU Tisch) and J de Leon (NYU Skirball).

Professor Gregory Vargo is the recipient of the 2019 NAVSA "Best Book of the Year" award for his work  An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018). This prize is awarded to the best book of the year in the field of Victorian Studies. Of Professor Vargo' book, the NAVSA said, "Gregory's book is a landmark study that changes how we think about Victorian literature and Victorian politics. This impeccably researched, beautifully structured monograph transforms our understanding of the relationship between Victorian literature and working-class politics."

Berg Professor of English, Harold Bloom, renowned literary critic and author of over forty books, passed away on Monday. He taught at NYU from 1988 to 2004, in addition to teaching at Yale and helping found Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Read his New York Times obituary here.  

Professor Maureen McLane, "Meanwhile Romanticism / Romanticism Meanwhile" in Keats-Shelley Journal 68, 142-146.