Della Pollock

Professor
Performance and Cultural Studies


Current Research: I am currently working on two manuscript projects.  The first, Visiting Pain, is an intimate ethnography of living with chronic or traumatic pain.  Based on informal interview-conversations, it investigates assumptions about the incommunicability of pain, practices of “masquerade,” and possibilities for tactical remembering.  The second project, Fragments from a Performance Movement, documents a long term partnership with a local African-American church that has evolved into a multi-faceted drama of social change.  The manuscript reflects on the power of performance to catalyze community action, to engage difference across multiple borders, and to articulate history and change, spiritual tradition and claims for equity in/as public pedagogies.
     Also developing a teaching/research project with the support of a Ueltschi service-learning grant, centered in a revision of 562:  Performance and Oral History.  Over  a three year period, the course will involve students in service, participant, interview, and collaborative performance relationships with members of local African American churches with the aim of understanding the nature and history of church communities in the wake of desegregation (following on an earlier incarnation of the course focussed on desegregation and the "inner life" of high schools).  

Recent Publications: Ed., Remembering:  Oral History Performance (New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); assoc. ed., Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, including chapter contributions:  "Performance Trouble," an introduction to performance theory, and "Memory, Remembering, and Histories of Change:  A Performance Praxis."  Forthcoming:  "The Performative 'I,'" Cultural Studies<>Critical Methodologies and "Marking New Directions in Performance Ethnography," Text and Performance Quarterly. Editorial:  co-editor with Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies.

Courses Regularly Taught: Introduction to Literature in Performance;  Introduction to Performance Ethnography; Politics of Performance; Performance and Oral History; Seminar in Performance and Cultural Studies; Seminar in Performance and History:  Remembering;  Seminar in Problems in Contemporary Performance Theory;  Seminar in the Body in Performance.

Faculty affiliate:  Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Folklore.

Areas of Specialization: Brechtian aesthetics and performance for social change; oral history in and as performance; the performance of memory; body politics, feminist/cultural theory; performing writing.

Honors: 2005    Institute for the Arts and Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:  Leadership Fellow
1998    National Communication Association:  Lilla Heston Award for Performance Scholarship
1996    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:  Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Professional Service:  Past chair of the Performance Studies Division, National Communication Association; Editorial boards:  Text and Performance Quarterly, Cultural Studies<>Critical Methodologies, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, Southern Communication Journal; Cultural Studies Annual.  University:  Founding director University Program in Cultural Studies; Chancellor’s Advisory Committee, 2001-2004 (Chair, 2003-04); Robertson Scholars Faculty Partner; current advisory boards:  Institute for the Arts and Humanities; Honors; Institute for African American Research; University Program in Cultural Studies.  

Current/Recent Work with Graduate Students: Recent PhDs:
2005    Willink, K.  “Desegregation, Dialogue, and Difference:  Remembering Camden County, NC.”
2005    Thomson, D.  “Fat Suit:  The Interperformative Possibilities of Obesity Lawsuits.”
2004    Hall, R.  “Danger and Desire:  Instrumental Realism in the History of the Wanted
Poster.”
2003    Odendahl, J.  “Bodies of Evidence:  Portraits of Post-Feminine Performance.” 
Current projects (exams complete, proposals approved):
Tes Thraves: youth documentary, intergenerational memory, and the Monacan "homecoming" ritual; Rivka Eisner:  performance and politics of memory among former women political prisoners in Vietnam.