Cultural Research: Clyde Smith

Clyde Smith, PhD - Director of Cultural Research

Vita Highlights

Power Relations in the Dance Classroom

I began researching power relations in the dance classroom as a Masters student and steadily presented and published scholarly papers throughout the mid to late 90s.

Publications and Presentations is an excerpt from my vita listing work that focuses on student experiences of abusive dance training.

The Conservatory as a Greedy Total Institution is a paper focused on testing a combination of Goffman's concept of the total institution and Coser's greedy institution in relationship to interviews with dancers regarding their conservatory training experience.

Alternative Forms of Data Presentation focuses on experiments with textual presentation and includes some of the texts created from interview data that offer alternative approaches to understanding.

Dance, Gender and Sexuality

Most of my writing on dance, gender and sexuality focuses on men's dance performance.

Mandala and the Men's Movement(s) is an article based on my Masters thesis discussing an evening of men's dance performance.

Bodies, Culture, Performance

The Missing Bodies in Reading Dancing is a brief early paper critiquing Susan Leigh Foster's Reading Dancing. This paper won a Graduate Writing Award from the National Dance Association in 1995.

The Prayerful Dancing Body encapsulates my interest in trance-possession states and was written when I was fortunate enough to study with Erika Bourguignon.

Education and Curriculum Design

The Responsive Doctoral Curriculum draws on an interview with Jill Dolan concerning the approach taken at the University of Texas to developing a doctoral program in theater studies responsive to the real-world needs of scholars as members of the community.

Bodywriting: Reading List covers the basic readings for a body-centered creative writing course I developed and taught at the Ohio State University.

When applying for faculty or postdoctoral positions, I was periodically asked to propose courses that I might teach as a new faculty member or Fellow:

Art for Engineers was written for a new college of engineering that was searching for founding faculty that would include researchers and educators in the arts.

Cultural Studies and Dance was proposed as a possible graduate seminar to relate my approach to cultural studies to the study of dance.

The Theater of Everyday Life was intended as an advanced undergraduate humanities course that would connect the discipline of performance art with the field of performance studies.