Introduction

Program Description

Graduate Faculty

Class Schedule

Graduate Diversity

Step by Step:
Getting ready for
Graduate School

INTRODUCTION

In the past decade, graduate study in the field of drama, theater, and performance studies has undergone an energetic renovation, and "performance" itself has become critical to scholarship and research across the humanities. At the same time, this disciplinary ferment has demanded a much higher degree of specialization, and of scholarly rigor from Ph.D. candidates seeking academic careers at the college and university level. The Graduate Group Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Berkeley is at the cutting edge of this epistemic shift. Centered in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, it is composed of an unrivalled faculty drawn from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Doctoral students have the opportunity to engage in performance activities that complement dissertation research, which itself ranges across the contemporary horizon of drama, theater, and performance studies. Currently, Ph.D. students are working on subjects that range from Vietnamese postcoloniality, transnational genealogies of modern Irish performance, and seventeenth-century French theatre and the church, to digital cinema and cinematic performance, virtuosity in contemporary dance, and "queer" funerary and memorial practices. Students admitted to the Ph.D. program are offered a full package of support, including fellowship and teaching assistantships.