Professor Hailed for Book On Dance and Politics

Prof. Victoria Fortuna wins award for “exceptionally deep” study of dance and political violence.

Prof. Victoria Fortuna has been honored with the de la Torre Bueno First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association for her book Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires, which examines how dancers and audiences responded to the violence and political upheaval in Argentina’s capital starting in the 1960s.

The award honors scholarly excellence in the field of dance studies. The citation reads (in part): 

“Moving Otherwise is an impressive history of contemporary dance in Buenos Aires from the mid-1960s to the mid-2010s: a period including a series of brutal military dictatorships that saw tens of thousands of people violently disappeared, as well as a devastating economic crisis… Its strengths include its exceptionally deep and serious engagement with dance studies sources; its significant contribution to the intersection of dance, trauma theory, and politics; its use of both English and Spanish-language sources; its effective theorizing, and clear and compelling prose.”

Prof. Fortuna is an assistant professor in the dance department at Reed College. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American concert dance, dance as a mode of political engagement and community organization, collaborative creation methods, and cultural histories of dance in transnational perspective. She founded and directs the Community Dance at Reed project, which brings together members of the Reed and broader Portland communities.

She is currently working on two projects: a digital humanities project focused on the use of personal collections in dance studies research and a book length project that examines the relationship between concert dance and the construction of race in Argentina during the twentieth century. Her articles appear in publications including Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. She has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Public Library, Fulbright, Society of Dance History Scholars, American Society for Theatre Research, and Latin American Studies Association. She also serves on the board of directors of the Dance Studies Association. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Brown University and an MA and PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University.

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