This working group gathers scholars who study nightlife: bars, clubs, drinking places, parties, festivals, the after hours, the underground, the underbelly of the dance floor, and the connected intimacies and exchanges of the night. We aim to support each other in these undertheorized and under researched places and communities often censored and marginalized due to perceived association with vice.
Theresa Goldbach, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair
Theresa Goldbach holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Goldbach is originally from San Antonio, Texas where she studied ballet, Mexican Folklorico, flamenco, and Spanish dance. She attended the University of Texas at Austin as a National Merit Scholar, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Radio-TV-Film in 1999. She studied flamenco at the Amor de Dios studios in Madrid, Spain. Goldbach worked for over 17 years as a bartender in Texas and Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of New Mexico's Master's program in Dance History in 2014. Goldbach conducted the research for her thesis, "Fascism, Flamenco, and Ballet Español" in the Archivo General de la Administración in Spain. She received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship from UC Riverside in 2014 and the Alumni Dissertation and Humanities Graduate Student Research Grants for dissertation research conducted in archives and flamenco venues in Madrid in 2017 for her dissertation “Losing the Center: Madrid, Flamenco, and Contested Urban Spaces.” In Spring 2018, she was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award from the Tourism and Leisure Studies Network. Goldbach has chapters published in the Fandango and Malagueña anthologies from Cambridge Scholars Press. Her research interests include flamenco, tourism, urban planning, bars and live music venues. She is currently teaching in the Humanities department at San Antonio Community College..
Christine Şahin, Exploratory Working Group Co-Chair
Christine Şahin is a dance practitioner-scholar and ethnographer specializing in contemporary Egyptian raqs sharqi (“belly dance”) and other MENAT (Middle Eastern, North African, and Turkish) dance genres. She was a Lecturer in Dance Studies with the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and earned her Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Her ethnographic research investigates local, intra-MENAT, and global circulations of raqs sharqi centered within Cairo, Egypt. In particular, she positions her research as a core site for analyzing the political, gender, and economic transformations the country has been experiencing in the aftermath of Egypt’s January 25th, 2011 revolution. Şahin’s book manuscript, Core Connections: Cairo Belly Dance in the Revolution’s Aftermath, a dance ethnography with Oxford University Press, was released in 2024. She has also been professionally performing and teaching raqs sharqi and other MENAT dances throughout the East and West coasts for over a decade, currently throughout the greater Baltimore area.
