NU Performance Studies

TODAY!
MONDAY May 4th, 12:30-1:50pm
Filling The Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic
A Talk with Rayya El Zein

Presented by
The Department of Performance Studies, co-sponsored by the MENA program
free & open to the public!

Zoom link in. Bio

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd @ 3:30 pm

A talk by Christipher B. Patterson!!!

This talk reflects on acts of writing in times of grief, disillusionment, and emerging fascism.
Crowe Hall, 1132 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208.
Open to all students! Lunch served @ 11:30am -2:00 pm

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.

Student Spotlight !

Congratulations are in orders for 3rd year Performance Studies Student Marsae Lynette who recently received a Fulbright award to Trinidad and Tobago for the 2026-2027 academic year!!!! 🧡🧡🧡

Marsae Lynette
Marsae Lynette is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and scholar pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, with a focus in environmental humanities and policy. Her research and creative practice center Afro-diasporic and Indigenous ecological performance through ritual, cultural memory, environmental justice, and the choreopoem form. She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Michigan. Marsae’s choreography and movement cinema have been featured in academic conferences, festivals, and productions such as “Hastings Street” at the Detroit Music Hall and “Magnolia Ballet” at Williamston Theatre. She has taught for institutions including Interlochen Center for the Arts. Currently the graduate assistant for the Black Arts Consortium in Chicago, she is also a member of the NU Abolitionist Lab and founding member of the Aarcc Coalition. Recipient of the Kresge Gilda Snowden Award and New Waves TT Artist Residency, Marsae’s work cultivates ecological empathy and collective action for a sustainable and just future.