research

My research interests most recently have turned towards the human being as embodied, as a conscious body, not only an anatomically but also experientially, with the Cartesian divide fully undone. Researching this understanding of the human self as thoughtful body has, for me, taken the form of a practice more than a scholarly investigation of texts.

current research interests

- practice of dance as study of self as physical being
- self as conscious body
- dance as physicalized expression of human emotional experience, state of mind and self-understanding within a socio-political context

current and recent practice

Presently, I am trying to use the practice of dance and movement forms as a means of research for gaining further insight into how sociopolitical context, self-understanding and physicality come into play within and among conscious bodies.

current and recent reading

- Merce Cunningham: The Dancer and the Dance – Marion Boyars
- The Thinking Body - Mabel Elsworth Todd
- Phenomenology and Dance – Maxine Sheets Johnstone
- The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness – Antonio Damasio
- Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom – Christiane Northrup
- Thus Spake Zarathustra, Birth of Tragedy – Friedrich Nietzsche
- The body – Jean Paul Sartre
- The spatiality of the lived body and motility - M. Merleau-Ponty
- Anthropodology: man a-foot - R. M. Griffith
- The nobility of sight: a study in the phenomenology of the senses - H. Jonas
- Born to see, bound to behold: reflections on the function of upright posture in the esthetic attitude - E. W. Straus

other areas of interest

– conceptions of human nature and their role in political thought
– the self in democratic thought; freedom, autonomy, and self-government
– self-development and existentialism
– feminist thought
– traditional Asian philosophy
– the role of the arts and performance in society

published papers

Phenomenology and Dance

– work in progress with Professor Matjaz Potrc and Vojko Strahovnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Falling and Fallen: A Comparative Study of Fall / Recovery in the works of Doris Humphrey and Jose Limón

– CORD 40th Anniversary Conference -Choreographies of Migration: Patterns of Global Mobility, Barnard College, New York City, November 8-11, 2007. Published by the Limón Foundation for their 100th Anniversary of Limón’s birth, October 2008

Changing Conceptions of the Self in Contemporary Democratic Theory

– presented at the Northeastern Political Science Association Convention, November 17-19, 2005

unpublished papers

– “Feminism as Transformation of Self-Understanding”
– “Grounded in a Question? Human Existence and Heidegger’s Non-Insistence”
– “Is Liberalism Inherently Illiberal?”
– “Philosophical Themes in Dostoyevsky”
– “Self-Development in J.S. Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche”