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Histories of Dance Working Group

Co-Chairs: Juliana DeVaan ([email protected]) & Emily Hawk ([email protected])

The Histories of Dance Working Group (HDWG) is a community of scholars who ground their studies of dance in archival research. The group serves as a platform for sharing resources, facilitating intergenerational conversation, and cultivating a network of people who are invested in historical methods. We welcome scholars whose primary focus is dance, but also those who write about theatre, music, popular entertainment, and movement within a broader context. We are interested in work that belongs to any period and geographic location, so long as its production incorporates archival research. HDWG plans to exist as an online forum (list-serv) in which members can impart information about events, conferences, recently opened archival collections, research inquiries, etc., but also as an in-person/hybrid symposium that meets once or twice a year in New York City. The in-person component of the group will focus on cultivating the work of doctoral students and junior scholars, who will present research and writing and receive comments from senior scholars.

 Juliana DeVaan, Working Group Co-Chair

Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in American history at Columbia University, where she is at work on a dissertation about experimental dance and performance in New York in the late-20th century. She has an MA in performance studies from NYU Tisch and a BA in dance, and ethnicity and race studies, from Columbia.

Emily Hawk, Working Group Co-Chair

Emily Hawk is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her current book project examines Black concert dance and community engagement during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and her work has been published in the Journal of Urban History and The Nation. She received her Ph.D. in History from Columbia University earlier this year.

Julie Malnig, Senior Scholar Advisor

Julie Malnig is Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the author of Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock ‘n’ Roll,

Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s (Oxford, 2023), which received Honorable Mention from the 2024 de la Torre Bueno Awards Committee. She is also the author of Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (NYU, 1995) and the editor of the collection Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (Illinois, 2009).

Julia Foulkes, Senior Scholar Advisor

Julia Foulkes is a Professor of History at The New School where she investigates questions about the arts, urban studies, and history. She is the author of A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (Chicago, 2016), To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal (Temple, 2011), and Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (UNC, 2002), and the curator of Joffrey + Ballet in the US (2024-2025) and Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York (2018-2019), both at the New York Public Library.

Lynn Garafola, Senior Scholar Advisor

Lynn Garafola is Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College. She is the author of La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern (Oxford, 2022), Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Da Capo, 1998), and the editor of several books, including The Diaries of Marius Petipa (SDHS, 1992), André Levinson on Dance (with Joan Acocella) (Wesleyan, 1991), José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir (Wesleyan, 2001), and The Ballets Russes and Its World (Yale, 1999). She has curated several exhibitions, including Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, and Diaghilev’s Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath.