Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
Why NYU?

The Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University is ideally suited to house the Hemispheric Institute. The flagship program of the field, founded in 1980, Performance Studies was the first to offer a master's and doctoral degree in the discipline and is currently the largest department of its kind in the nation. It is home to two premiere scholarly journals, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory as well as the administrative home of the Shubert Archives. The department participates in a U.S. Consortium on Performance and Politics that includes as members Harvard, Dartmouth, Trinity College, and MIT, which hosts an annual symposium. In 1995 the Department launched a major annual conference in Performance Studies, whose success has led to the formation in 1998 of a new scholarly association, Performance Studies international in which the department actively serves as a founding member.

New York University: Performance Studies in a Global Context

NYU enjoys a reputation as a "Global University" for its international character. The Department of Performance Studies has students from all over the world, and a diverse community of students and faculty who are Latin American, African American, U.S. Latino, Asian, European, and American.

NYU has an impressive number of faculty members in the Tisch School of the Arts and in the Graduate School of Arts and Science who specialize in Latin American and Latino studies, many of whom are active participants in the Hemispheric Institute. These include

• Institute director, Diana Taylor, a leading scholar of Latin American theatre and performance, author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America, and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War."
• Professor Sylvia Molloy in the Department of Spanish, whose Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities has funded short residencies for several notable Latin American scholars and artists including Nelly Richards, Beatriz Sarlos, Ricardo Piglia, and many others.
• George Yudice in the Department of American Studies, editor of On Edge: the crisis of contemporary Latin American culture and founding member of the research group dedicated to the issues arising out of the 'Privatization of Culture' in the Americas.
• Noted Brazilianists at Tisch include Robert Stam in Cinema Studies, author many important texts on Brazilian cinema, including Tropical multiculturalism: a comparative history of race in Brazilian cinema and culture.
• Barbara Browning in Performance Studies, author of Samba: Resistance in Motion.

In addition to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University is also home to the interdisciplinary Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and The King Juan Carlos of Spain Center, one of the world's premiere institutions for research and teaching on modern Spain and also Latin America, whose extensive public programming encourages interaction among the academic, diplomatic, and business communities interested in Spain and Latin America.