Bio.
VK Preston is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University’s History Department and faculty member of Philadelphia-based University of the Arts’ internationally situated Dance MFA program.
VK’s work on the witch trials, performativity, dance, and theatre emerged during fellowships at the École normale supérieure in Paris and La Cité internationale des arts.
After completing a Ph.D. at Stanford University’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies with a PhD minor in History, VK pursued postdoctoral fellowships at McGill’s Institute for the Public Life of the Arts and Ideas and the Sense Lab. In 2019 they received a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the project “New Directions in Seventeenth-Century Performance Research: Intangible Baroques” for work on histories of colonization, dance, and material culture. They are currently completing a book manuscript based on this research and a forthcoming article for Postmedieval.
Dr. Preston’s writing appears in Theatre Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, Canadian Theatre Review, and History, Memory, Performance. VK’s “Baroque Relations: Performing Gold and Silver in Daniel Rabel’s Ballets of the Americas” (ed. Mark Franko, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment) received the 2018 Gertrude Lippincott prize for best English-language essay from the Dance Studies Association. In 2014, Alanna Thain and VK Preston won the Richard Plant award for best article in English on a topic in Canadian theatre and performance studies for “Tendering the Flesh: the ABC’s of Dave St-Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias” in TDR / The Drama Review.
VK comes to performance scholarship by way of practice, following professional training in dance and theatre and ongoing, experimental histories of the performing arts in collaboration with contemporary artists. VK’s current writing projects include studies of art and performance entangled with the colonial invasion of the Americas, from baroque performance to performance art. Their current research includes cultural histories of performance and performativity, environmental humanities, the witch trials, race, critical dance studies, theatre, dis/ability, sexuality, and queer performance.
Areas of teaching specialization include performance historiography (1500-1850), new materialisms, affect studies, gender studies, settler-Indigenous studies, archive studies, dance theory, political theatre, queer theory, time-based arts, performance media & dramaturgy.
VK is a fellow of the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto. In 2016 VK received an Australian Research Council’s History of Emotions Project early career fellowship and a short-term research fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library.
Dr. Preston enjoys participating in collaborative research communities. These include the UArts Dance (MFA) summer program in Montpellier at ICI, the Institut Chorégraphique International (International Choreographic Institute), Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute (MISHI), Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, Early Modern Cross-Cultural Conversions at the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH, the Sense Lab, KlangKunstBühne at Universität der Künste in Berlin, and the Mobile Academy in Warsaw.
They arrive in Montreal following positions at the University of Toronto (2016-2020) and as Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (2015-2016).
EDUCATION
PhD, Stanford University
MA, SUNY Binghamton
BA, Concordia University
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