Professor, Department of English, Associate Member, Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University
I am a performance studies theorist with particular research interests in the place-based relationships between audience and event. My most recent book, World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (Manchester University Press, 2010), uses elements of imaginative ethnography (without calling it that) to examine, among other things, mega-events like the Olympics, the politics of same-sex marriage, the protocols of civic memorialization and mourning, and the effects of climate change–all through a performing arts lens and with a focus on Vancouver. Among other things, my current research is centered on a kind of imaginative ethnography of dance-theatre in Vancouver.