The UW Department of Dance is delighted to share that Catherine Cole, Divisional Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington, will be joining the Department of Dance in Autumn of 2020. Cole will split her appointment between Dance and English, her official “home” department. She will teach a dance course every other year while she continues her role as Divisional Dean of the Arts. Her areas of expertise include human rights, law and performance, African theater and performance in national and transnational contexts, ethnography and fieldwork, disability studies, performance in the global South, and contemporary American performance.
More about Catherine Cole
PhD Northwestern University
AB Occidental College
Catherine M. Cole is Divisional Dean of the Arts and Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington. Her most recent book, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, is about dance and live art in contemporary South Africa and beyond. Previous books include Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010) and Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001). Cole has co-edited the book Africa After Gender?, as well as special issues of Theatre Survey on “African and Afro-Caribbean Performance” and TDR: The Drama Review on "Routes of Blackface.” Cole’s disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002-2005.
With over 25 years of teaching and administrative experience, Cole has held previous positions as Chair at the University of California, Berkeley as well as Associate Director for Special Projects at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Vice Chair of the Academic Senate at UC Santa Barbara. She has served as Executive Editor of the journal Theatre Survey and Vice President for Publications for the American Society for Theatre Research. Cole has received the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award, fellowships from the National Humanities Center Fellowship, Harvard Theatre Collection, and AAUW, and nominations for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize, ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt book award, and UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award. She’s also received grants from the Freie Universität Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for U.S. Artists, ELA Foundation, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.