Faculty News: Choice Magazine Names Professor Giersdorf’s Book Outstanding Academic Title

Each year, Choice publishes a list of Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

About The Body of the People
Professor Giersdorf’s text is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany as a disciplinary and resistive tool. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis.

Professor Giersdorf also received the 2014 Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics from the Lilian Karina Foundation in Sweden for the translation of the book into German.  

The book is available via The University of Wisconsin Press.

Professor Giersdorf’s research focuses on the politics of choreographies of nationhood and locality in a global context as well as the disciplinary history of dance studies’ epistemology. He has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals including Dance Research Journal, GLQ – Gay & Lesbian Quarterly, Forum Modernes Theater, and Maska, and his work has been anthologized in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the USA. Giersdorf is a member of the editorial boards of the Society of Dance History Scholars and Dance Research Journal. Professor Giersdorf earned a Magister in Theatre, Dance, and Music Theatre Theory from the University of Leipzig, received his Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside, and taught in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey and Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Published: March 14, 2014