Dr Clare Parfitt
Senior Lecturer
Research Areas
- Cultural histories of popular dance practices in street, stage and screen contexts
- Cultural memory
- Relationships between visual technologies (e.g. photography, film, digital media) and the body in modernity and postmodernity
My research is broadly concerned with the historical and cultural construction of dancing bodies during modernity and postmodernity. I have a particular interest in popular dance practices (on the street, stage or screen), whose low-art status and supposed triviality often disguise the workings of highly complex historical and cultural processes. My work focuses on the vehicles that carry popular dance practices through history and across geographical space, such as memory and the visual technologies of photography, film and digital media.
This research is interdisciplinary and mediates between dance studies, film studies, cultural history and memory studies.
Current Research
- Collaboration with five colleagues from Roehampton University on a PhD study skills
Book, Planning Your PhD, to be published by Palgrave in July 2010
- Research leave funded by the Research Incentive Fund at the University of Chichester to write two book chapters for anthologies on Hollywood film dance and Popular Dance and Music
Past Research
My doctoral thesis is titled Capturing the Cancan: Body Politics from the Enlightenment to Postmodernity. It focuses on the relationship between the cancan and the various legal, mechanical, digital and critical technologies that have attempted to capture it since its emergence in the late 1820s. This research was funded by a Graduate Assistantship from Roehampton University.
You can read my thesis at: http://roehampton.openrepository.com/roehampton/handle/10142/39514
Postgraduate Research Supervision
I am interested in supervising doctoral research, particularly in the following areas:
- Popular dance practices (historical or contemporary; on street, stage or screen)
- Cultural memory and the body
- The history of relationships between visual technologies and the body
- Dance and cultural identities (e.g. gender, race, class, nationality, etc.)
This list is not comprehensive, so please contact me to discuss your idea.
I am currently supervising an MPhil project investigating the Costa Rican quadrille in relation to cultural identity.
Qualifications
PhD Dance Studies - University of Surrey, Roehampton (2008)
MA Dance Studies with distinction - University of Surrey (2002)
BA (hons) and MA (cantab) Archaeology and Anthropology – Pembroke College, Cambridge University (2000)
Publications
Forthcoming
July 2010 - Co-author of Planning Your PhD to be published by Palgrave (under contract)
2010 ‘Cyborg Cinema: (dis)embodying cultural memory in the digital age’, Journal of the Korean Society of Dance
2010 ‘A Cyborg in Paris: Moulin Rouge! and prosthetic memory’, to be published in an anthology on Hollywood film dance edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli
2010 ‘Revolutionary Moves: ‘the popular’ between the French and digital revolutions’, to be published in anthology of papers from the Popular Dance and Music Matters Symposia
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
2009 ‘‘Like a Butterfly Under Glass’: the cancan, Loïe Fuller, and cinema’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Special Issue on Dance on Screen edited by Sherril Dodds, Vol. 5, No. 2-3, December, pp. 107-120
2005 ‘The Spectator's Dancing Gaze in Moulin Rouge!’, Research in Dance Education, Vol. 6, No. 1-2, April-December, pp. 97-110
Book Review
2009 ‘Dance in a World of Change: Reflections on Globalization and Cultural Difference, edited by Sherry B. Shapiro’, Research in Dance Education, Vol. 10, No. 2, June, pp. 143-147
Conference Papers (selected)
International
2009 ‘From Fairground Site to Website: the dancing body and visual technology in early film and YouTube’, presented at Topographies: Sites, Bodies and Technologies, Society of Dance History Scholars Conference, Stanford University and San Francisco, California, 19th-22nd June
- Published in the Proceedings of Topographies: Sites, Bodies and Technologies, p. 180-184
2008 Invited Speaker ‘Cyborg Cinema: (dis)embodying cultural memory in the digital age’, presented at Dance and Culture, The 23rd International Academic Symposium of the Korean Society of Dance, Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, South Korea, 7th November (simultaneous translation into Korean)
- Published in the Proceedings of Dance and Culture, pp. 52-64 (English), pp. 39-51 (Korean translation)
2007 ‘Chahut: The Mediation of Rationalism and the Unruly Body in the Cancan’, presented at Re-thinking Practice and Theory, Congress on Research in Dance/Society for Dance History Scholars Conference, Centre Nationale de la Danse, Paris, 21st-24th June
- Published in the Proceedings of Re-thinking Practice and Theory, pp. 34-37
National
2010 Invited Speaker ‘Firing the Canon: integrating popular dance into the dance curriculum’, presented at Teaching Popular Dance in Higher Education, Palatine (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Dance, Drama and Music) Symposium, Institute for Performing Arts Development Dance Centre (Trinity Buoy Wharf), University of East London, 26th January
- Published as a resource in the event report on the Palatine website
http://www.palatine.ac.uk/events/viewreport/1622/
2008 Keynote Address ‘Revolutionary Moves: ‘the popular’ between the French and digital revolutions’, presented at Popular Dance and Music Matters Symposium, University of Surrey, 25th October
Teaching
Module Leadership:
- MA: Performing Politics
- Year 3: Dance Dissertation
- Year 2: Popular Dance: Street, Stage and Screen
Performance and Identity
- Year 1: Dance Theatre Heritage
- Modernism/Dancing Modern Histories
Dissertation/Research supervision: MPhil, MA, BA
Links
My Academia.edu page: http://chi.academia.edu/ClareParfitt
My Roehampton University research page (including link to my thesis): http://roehampton.openrepository.com