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Dr. Lindsey Drury

Dr. Lindsey Drury

Institute:

Subject:

Critical Dance Studies

Researcher

Address
Grunewaldstraße 35
Room 221
12165 Berlin
Fax
+49 30 838 - 4 67302

Office hours

Summer Semester: Mondays 12:00-13:00, Tuesdays 11:00-12:00

Or by appointment (l.drury@fu-berlin.de)

Summer Semester 2026

Valeska Gert and Her Afterlives (mit Prof. Dr. Lucia Ruprecht) | Vorlesungsreihe 
     (Open widely to Institute for Theater Studies students)
Performance, Violence, and the Body | Seminar
     (BA Theaterwissenschaft)
Dance and Magic | Übung
     (MA Critical Dance Studies) 

Winter Semester 2025/2026

Writing Dance on Film | Practical Seminar
     (MA Critical Dance Studies)
Witch Dances | Seminar
     (MA Critical Dance Studies)

Summer Semester 2025

Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and Archival Methods | Practical Seminar
     (MA Critical Dance Studies / MA Theater Studies)
Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology | Lecture Series
     (Open to widely to Institute for Theater Studies students)

Winter Semester 2024/2024

#DANCE in Popular and Public Discourse | Practical Seminar
     (MA Critical Dance Studies)
Sounding Bodies: The Science of Practice (with João Cardante Romão) | Seminar
     (MA Critical Dance Studies / MA Music Sound and Performance)

Summer Semester 2024

The Body on Display: Introduction to Performance Analysis | Seminar
     (BA Theater Studies)

Winter Semester 2023/24

Critical Dance Anthropology | Practical Seminar
     (MA Dance Studies)
Project Colloquium: Fictional Realism | Seminar
     (MA Dance Studies)

Summer Semester 2023

Ways of Witness: Introduction to Performance Analysis | Seminar
     (BA Theater Studies)

Trained as an early modernist, Lindsey Drury is an historian and performance studies scholar who works on dance, colonial history, and the ethnological archive. She holds a PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin and University of Kent-Canterbury and currently works as a Postdoc within Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she researches, teaches, and organizes the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship program. She is the 2022 Honorable Mention for the Gertrude Lippincott award for best article in the field of dance studies. Recent awards include a research fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek, and an Irene H. Chayes Travel Grant. For her postgraduate research, she was awarded an Erasmus Mundus PhD Fellowship (2015-2019), mobility grants from the German Academic Exchange Service / Bundesministerium für Bilding und Forschung (FUBright), and a Graduate Research Fellowship at the University of Utah (2007-2008). Along with Nina Tolksdorf, Drury guest edited a special issue of the journal Interface Critique, “Conversing the Book”. Recent articles and book chapters include “The Circumpolar North, Indigenous Art, and Settler Aesthetics of Remoteness” (2026), “A Historiography of Face, Race, and Interface in Media Theory” (2025), and “Cannibal Choreographies: Anthropology, Anthropophagy, and Modernist Dance in the Americas” (2025). She has been a guest speaker in many contexts, including at the Universität Hamburg, Sorbonne Université, the University of Kentucky, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). She has been a guest researcher at the Warburg Institute and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (Paris).  

Forthcoming 2026. Cosmic Body Dancing Plague: Performance and cosmology in the work of Paracelsus. Under contract, Brill Aries book series.

Forthcoming 2027. Dances for the Potter’s Wheel: Body, time, and world in early print (working title). Under review.

Forthcoming est. 2028. Fragments for a Natural History of Dance (working title). In progress, estimated completion 2026.

2025. Guest editor with Nina Tolksdorf, Interface Critique Vol. 5, "Conversing the Book". https://ahnp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/ic/issue/view/7477 

Book Chapters
Forthcoming 2025. “Imitation de la foi: Matérialité, imagination et croyance dans l'écriture tardive de Paracelse sur la danse de St Vitus” 
Le Corps et les Pouvoirs de l'Imagination, Elizabeth Claire, Beatrice Delaurenti, Roberto Poma, and Koen Vermeir, eds. (Turnhout: Brepols).
Forthcoming 2025. “Pellicle and Portrait: Face, race, and interface in media theory (from Lavater to Dagognet to Galloway)” Interface Critique (Heidelberg: Arthistoricum Verlag).
2024. “Memory, Ceremony, Sacrifice: Gene Weltfish, the Pawnee Nation, and the Settler State”, in: 
Marginality and Resistencia. Miguel Rivas Venegas, Martina Weisz, eds. (Berlin: DeGruyter)
2022. “The Blurred Bodies of Matachines: Warburg's Notes on a Colonial New Mexican Dance Drama”, in: Lightning Symbol and Snake Dance: Aby Warburg and Pueblo Art, Uwe Fleckner and Christine Chavez, eds. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz).
2021. “When is a House? In Seven Figures”, in: Institution is a Verb: A Panoply Performance Lab Compilation, Esther Neff, Ayana Evans, Tsedaye Makonnen, Elizabeth Lamb, eds. (New York: The Operating System)

Journal Articles
August 2023. “The Transhistorical, Transcultural Life of Sausages: From medieval morescas to New Mexican Matachines with Aby Warburg”. Postmedieval, special issue “Legacies of Medieval Dance” guest edited by Kathryn Dickason.
April 2022 “What’s in a Name? Somatics and the Historical Revisionism of Thomas Hanna” Dance Research Journal.
September 2021. “The Double-Life of ‘Pagan Dance’: Indigenous Rituality, Early Modern Dance and the Language of US Newspapers” European Journal of Theatre and Performance, No. 03. Essays Section, "Language and Performance: Moving across Discourses and Practices in a Globalised World", Małgorzata Sugiera, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, and Timmy De Laet, eds. -Peer reviewed-
2017. with Dee Ali, “The Judson Dancers”. Matters of Act: A Journal of Ideas, Drury & No Collective, eds. (Brooklyn: Already Not Yet Press)
2014. “Mobilizing the Ineffable: Yvonne Meier” Learning to Love Dance More: A Performance Journal. Volume 8, Displacement (Summer 2014), 8-12.
2012. “Interview with Yvonne Meier” Learning to Love Dance More: A Performance Journal. Volume 5, Back to School (Fall 2012).
2011. “Emergence: Watching and being early-career artists in New York City dance” Critical Correspondence, Movement Research (NYC).


Invited Guest Lectures

2026. “Bitter Gall: A Lecture Performance” Winter School curated by Anna Leon, Tanzquartier Wien 2026

2024. “Virgin Sacrifice: Anthropology, Modernity, and Dance” Lecture series on Gender and Epistemology, Universität Hamburg

2024. “The colonial, the carceral, the corpus” 2024 Keynote lecture, Symposium Critical Somatics – Expanded Contemporary Dance, Amsterdam

2024. “Toward a History of Dance Imagination” Lecture series on new methods in dance historiography, Freie Universität Berlin

2023. “Hungry Grandfathers: Blood and time in Warburg’s early work on colonial dance drama” guest lecture at the Warburg Haus, Hamburg

2022. “Subjects and Objects. Critical Historicism between a Colonial Dance Drama and Aby Warburg” Dance History Lecture Series, Freie Universität Berlin.

2021. “The Blurred Bodies of Matachines”, Art History Seminar, Universität Hamburg

2021. “Double Life of Pagan Dance”, Dance History, Western Washington University Dance Program

2021. “When is a House?”, Art Studio MFA seminar of Rae Goodwin, University of Kentucky

2019. “Imitation of Faith”, Seminar Haine de la Danse Université Paris Sorbonne

2019. “Paracelsus’ Theory of Imagination”, Seminar History of Imagination. EHESS

2019. “Paracelsus and the Veitstanz in Four Parts” Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel

Invited Panel Talks

June 2025. “Other ‘Others’: Outsiders and Ancestors from Basque Carnival to New Mexican Matachines”. Paper presented with a curated panel of the Performance and Migration working group, International Federation for Theater Research (IFTR), Cologne, Germany.

May 2025. “Toward a Colonial History of Dance: From Le Pays Basque to Indigenous North America”. Invited talk for panel series Images of Dancing Women in the Middle Ages sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo).

December 2023. “State of the Arts. Anthropology, Theatre, and Migration - Talk, Roundtable” Panelist alongside Lucia Ruprecht, Azadeh Sharifi, Jonas Tinius, and Matthias Warstat at the booklaunch event, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Uni. Berlin

July 2023. “Response to Evelyn Schuler-Zea’s ‘Knots, Stones and Living with the Dead’” Invited short response presentation for the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” Annual Conference: “Constant Change: The Temporal Dimensions of Materialities in the Arts” Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Germany.

May 2022. “Texturing Space – Towards an Exponential Cartography” Panelist alongside Christoph Brunner (Leuphana University), Knut Ebeling (weißensee – kunsthochschule berlin), and Marius Förster (Designer), MissRead book fair, Berlin

September 2019. “Third Culture Kids – Schreiben zwischen den Kulturen” Panelist alongisde Kaveh Akbar, Michel Faber, Simon Godart, and Chibundu Onuzo at the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin at Silent Green. 

Academic Presentations

December 2025. “Misunderstanding Matachines: A Comparative History of Colonial Dance Drama and Performance Theory” Performance Studies International annual conference, Fortaleza, Brazil.

October 2024. “Imitation of Faith: Magic and science in Paracelsus’s late writing on St Vitus Dance” Symposium, “Between Science and Magic”, Turku.

July 2024. “Cannibal Choreographies: Dance primitivism, art history, and modernist anthropology” Jahrestagung, Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung, Essen.

July 2024. “Settler / Indigenous Dance Modernisms: Some problems and an approach” Dance Studies Association Annual Conference, Buenos Aires. By invitation from Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht to the panel series “Remapping Dance Modernisms”

November 2023. “Modern Dance Ancestry and Colonial Reckoning in the work of Keith Hennessy” American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting, Arlington, Virginia. Funded by an Irene H. Chayes Travel Grant.

November 2023. “Bodies of Empire, Bodies of Others: Dance in Medieval Asia through the Lens of the Period’s European Authors” Invited speaker, “Transforming a Medieval Saga Into a Contemporary Ballad and Dance Performance” organized by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit.

July 2023. “The Tug of War: An ethnological collection between cultural Singapore, revitalization and the history of imperialism” International Society for Cultural History annual conference. 

October 2022. “A Dancing Bear: Plastic Shamanism and Settler Modern Dance ‘Ancestry’” Invited presenter to INSPIRED hub curated by Alexander Schwan, “Dancing Resilience” Dance Studies Association Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada.

September 2022. “Dancing Bodies between Political Activism and Indigenous Survivance” Invited participant in panel “Analyzing Activist Bodies” curated by Alexander Schwan and Nina Tolksdorf, “Matters of Urgency” Congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft, Berlin.

August 2022. “Captive Material Histories of Indigenous Dance: Ethnological Museums, Repatriation Efforts, and the field of Dance Studies” Dancing with Decolonization International Conference. Online.

July 2022. “It’s not a Tacit Decolonial. Artistic Research, practice-based knowledges, and European research” At the Nordic Summer University. Study Circle 7: Experiencing Artistic Research through the Senses, Oslo.

November 2021. “Neither Field nor Forensic, neither property nor sovereignty” Introduction of the workshop Depth of Field: Decolonization and the Grounds of Art(istic) Research, hosted by EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin.

October 2021. “‘We’re not Pagan’: Indigenous Discourses on Dance and Religion in US newspapers around the turn of the turn of the 20th century” As a part of a panel series organized with Alexander Schwann and Kathryn Dickason titled Radical Religion for the Dance Studies Association Conference, Rutgers University.

November 2020. “What is the Digital Doing?” Introductory session for the What is the Digital Doing? workshop organized with Nina Tolksdorf

May 2020. “Vulnerability for Open Science” Freie Universität Open Science Working Group, “Digital Humanities and Open Science”

July 2019. “A Cosmic Dance of Miraculous Forgery: the St Vitus dance, imagination, and the sidereal body” European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, Amsterdam. 

January 2019. “Immersed in reading / reading as immersion” Bodies of Design Somaesthetics Conference, Florida Atlantic University. 

August 2018. “Amnesia of Acts: toward a history of physical practice.” Nordic Summer University, Fårö. 

July 2018. “Ennobling the Body at War: Anti-Dance Treatises on the Lineage of Phyrric Dance.” Dance Studies Association 2018 Conference, Malta. 

September 2017. “Passing Time, Pastimes and Past Times: in Two Arrested Dances of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Tramutatione Metallica Sogni Tre” Shape of Return conference, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin. 

April 2017. "'We Added Nothing of Our Own:’ the ethics of two women publishers in mid-16th century Paris” Othello’s Island 5th Annual Conference. 

April 2016. “What is Walking and How to Do It: Textual Estrangement and Experiential Anatomy in the Work of John Weaver.” Oxford Annual Dance Symposium.