Una Chaudhuri
Biographic Data
| ID | 1195865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Una Chaudhuri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Una |
| FAMILY NAME | Chaudhuri |
| SIGNATURE | CHAUDHURI U |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 71 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
LeAnn Fields and University of Michigan Press
In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate …
Dis-Anthropocentric Performance: The Climate Lens Playbook
How might performance contribute to a reversal of the social values and political systems that have produced climate chaos, plunging countless species into crisis and catastrophe? What recognitions would such a reversal require? What misrecognitions must it defeat
Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas
The scale and complexity of climate change, as well as its often incremental and unspectacular nature, pose formidable obstacles to dramatic representation. Wallace Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors subtly distorts the conventions of the thesis play, or drama of ideas, to reveal the habits of mind that are responsible for our species’ steady progress towards ecological disaster. A ‘drama of bad ideas’ for the Anthropocene, the play…
The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance
The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres: Technology and Performance
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
Unthinking survivalism: Inner climate change
Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook
Theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change. Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical
Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality
This essay uses an animal studies perspective to situate Tracy Letts's 1996 play Bug at a particularly fraught and complex moment in the long history of an "insect imaginary," which has variously registered and managed humans' intense ambivalence toward insects. The complexity includes a dawning recognition-alongside a reluctant admission-that insect species may not be as alien as we have traditionally styled them. In Bug , as in a variety of oth…
Animals in War, Animals on War: New Perspectives from a Theater of Species
Critical Theory and Performance
(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance
The face-to-face encounter between human and animal, a key trope in the discourse of contemporary Animal Studies as well as of zooësis—the broad field of cultural animal representations—offers a way to chart the effect of the animal presence on traditional performance genres, including tragedy
Animalizing Performance, Becoming-Theatre: Inside Zooesis with The Animal Project at NYU
When we "become-animal," what do animals become? Synopsis In summer 2004, three theatre collaborators-a director, a playwright, and a critic-dramaturg-began a new collaboration, "The Animal Project," conceived as an exploratory encounter between theatre and the emerging field of Critical Animal Studies. The work was guided especially by four texts: the chapter "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . ," in Gilles Deleuze a…
Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France
March 01 2004 Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays (UMI Research Press, 1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (University of Michigan Press, 1985), editor of Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rose…
Sniff Art
June 01 2004 Sniff Art Jessica Chalmers, Jessica Chalmers Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently working on a performance about the 1963 demise of the Studebaker Corporation, in conjunction with the Builders Association, scheduled to open in Fall 2004. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the autho…
Books
December 01 2003 Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty; Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty. By KubiakAnthonyStaging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind. By DemastesWilliam W. Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Goog…
Take Me Out (review)
The deliciously punny title of Richard Greenberg's most recent play invokes both the rich mythology that makes baseball an irresistible subject for writers in search of the American grain, as well as the violence, however muted and coded, that shores up constructions of American masculinity. The play, which moved to New York's Public Theatre after a critically acclaimed run at London's Donmar Warehouse, where it was part of an "American Imports" …
Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama
The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism "zooesis" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose term "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the…
A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, I invited a number of theatre and performance scholars to respond to the concept of tragedy in the context of these world-changing events. The following forum showcases the generosity of a wide range of scholars who signed on to this project with enthusiasm and conviction. More than ever, I believe that our intellectual labor can make a difference. The forum demonstrates much more than the vitality of…
Topdog/Underdog (review)
In recent decades an alternative American drama has thrown wide the doors of traditional psychological realism to let in an expansive vision of American history, geography, and speech. Suzan-Lori Parks is perhaps the leader—certainly the exemplar—of that drama. The large themes (and memorable titles) of such plays as The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, and Venus have placed Parks securely within both the repertoire and…
Like a tree
(2002). Like a tree. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 9-18
Books
December 01 2001 Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. By KolinPhilip C. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; 229 pp.; illustrations. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama and Chair of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Una Chaudhuri Professor of English an…
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert styles. Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W.B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theatre relies on the natural…
Private Parts: "Sex, Class, and Stage Space in "Miss Julie
The plot of Miss Julie turns on an unusual conjunction of sexual and spatial determinism, an association which also includes the issue of class. The aristocratic Julie and her valet Jean are literally and figuratively trapped into intercourse when, to avoid being seen together alone, they are forced into hiding in Jean's room. This fateful concealment, which Strindberg is at pains to characterize also as a fated development, renders the disruptio…
The Feminist Spectator as Critic
Critical Theory and Performance
Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama
The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism "zooesis" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose term "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the…
Animalizing Performance, Becoming-Theatre: Inside Zooesis with The Animal Project at NYU
When we "become-animal," what do animals become? Synopsis In summer 2004, three theatre collaborators-a director, a playwright, and a critic-dramaturg-began a new collaboration, "The Animal Project," conceived as an exploratory encounter between theatre and the emerging field of Critical Animal Studies. The work was guided especially by four texts: the chapter "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . ," in Gilles Deleuze a…
(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance
The face-to-face encounter between human and animal, a key trope in the discourse of contemporary Animal Studies as well as of zooësis—the broad field of cultural animal representations—offers a way to chart the effect of the animal presence on traditional performance genres, including tragedy
The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance
Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality
This essay uses an animal studies perspective to situate Tracy Letts's 1996 play Bug at a particularly fraught and complex moment in the long history of an "insect imaginary," which has variously registered and managed humans' intense ambivalence toward insects. The complexity includes a dawning recognition-alongside a reluctant admission-that insect species may not be as alien as we have traditionally styled them. In Bug , as in a variety of oth…
Animals in War, Animals on War: New Perspectives from a Theater of Species
A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, I invited a number of theatre and performance scholars to respond to the concept of tragedy in the context of these world-changing events. The following forum showcases the generosity of a wide range of scholars who signed on to this project with enthusiasm and conviction. More than ever, I believe that our intellectual labor can make a difference. The forum demonstrates much more than the vitality of…
Private Parts: "Sex, Class, and Stage Space in "Miss Julie
The plot of Miss Julie turns on an unusual conjunction of sexual and spatial determinism, an association which also includes the issue of class. The aristocratic Julie and her valet Jean are literally and figuratively trapped into intercourse when, to avoid being seen together alone, they are forced into hiding in Jean's room. This fateful concealment, which Strindberg is at pains to characterize also as a fated development, renders the disruptio…
The Feminist Spectator as Critic
Private Parts: "Sex, Class, and Stage Space in "Miss Julie
The plot of Miss Julie turns on an unusual conjunction of sexual and spatial determinism, an association which also includes the issue of class. The aristocratic Julie and her valet Jean are literally and figuratively trapped into intercourse when, to avoid being seen together alone, they are forced into hiding in Jean's room. This fateful concealment, which Strindberg is at pains to characterize also as a fated development, renders the disruptio…
Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert styles. Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W.B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theatre relies on the natural…
Books
December 01 2001 Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire. By KolinPhilip C. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; 229 pp.; illustrations. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama and Chair of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Una Chaudhuri Professor of English an…
A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001
In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, I invited a number of theatre and performance scholars to respond to the concept of tragedy in the context of these world-changing events. The following forum showcases the generosity of a wide range of scholars who signed on to this project with enthusiasm and conviction. More than ever, I believe that our intellectual labor can make a difference. The forum demonstrates much more than the vitality of…
Topdog/Underdog (review)
In recent decades an alternative American drama has thrown wide the doors of traditional psychological realism to let in an expansive vision of American history, geography, and speech. Suzan-Lori Parks is perhaps the leader—certainly the exemplar—of that drama. The large themes (and memorable titles) of such plays as The Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, The America Play, and Venus have placed Parks securely within both the repertoire and…
Like a tree
(2002). Like a tree. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 9-18
Books
December 01 2003 Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty; Staging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty. By KubiakAnthonyStaging Consciousness: Theater and the Materialization of Mind. By DemastesWilliam W. Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Goog…
Take Me Out (review)
The deliciously punny title of Richard Greenberg's most recent play invokes both the rich mythology that makes baseball an irresistible subject for writers in search of the American grain, as well as the violence, however muted and coded, that shores up constructions of American masculinity. The play, which moved to New York's Public Theatre after a critically acclaimed run at London's Donmar Warehouse, where it was part of an "American Imports" …
Animal Geographies: Zooesis and the Space of Modern Drama
The burgeoning field of animal studies offers a new perspective on that overlap of cultural and performance space that we call mimesis. In proposing the neologism "zooesis" for this new perspective, I hope to invoke, as a foundation for my exploration of animal discourses in modern drama, the path-breaking work of Cary Wolfe, whose term "zoontologies" suggests just how much is at stake for literature and the humanities in the "the question of the…
Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France
March 01 2004 Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays (UMI Research Press, 1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (University of Michigan Press, 1985), editor of Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rose…
Sniff Art
June 01 2004 Sniff Art Jessica Chalmers, Jessica Chalmers Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently working on a performance about the 1963 demise of the Studebaker Corporation, in conjunction with the Builders Association, scheduled to open in Fall 2004. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the autho…
Animalizing Performance, Becoming-Theatre: Inside Zooesis with The Animal Project at NYU
When we "become-animal," what do animals become? Synopsis In summer 2004, three theatre collaborators-a director, a playwright, and a critic-dramaturg-began a new collaboration, "The Animal Project," conceived as an exploratory encounter between theatre and the emerging field of Critical Animal Studies. The work was guided especially by four texts: the chapter "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . ," in Gilles Deleuze a…
Critical Theory and Performance
(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance
The face-to-face encounter between human and animal, a key trope in the discourse of contemporary Animal Studies as well as of zooësis—the broad field of cultural animal representations—offers a way to chart the effect of the animal presence on traditional performance genres, including tragedy
Animals in War, Animals on War: New Perspectives from a Theater of Species
Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality
This essay uses an animal studies perspective to situate Tracy Letts's 1996 play Bug at a particularly fraught and complex moment in the long history of an "insect imaginary," which has variously registered and managed humans' intense ambivalence toward insects. The complexity includes a dawning recognition-alongside a reluctant admission-that insect species may not be as alien as we have traditionally styled them. In Bug , as in a variety of oth…
Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook
Theatre is a uniquely powerful site for the kind of thinking called for by the crises of climate change. Encompassing academic research, theatre work-shopping, playwriting, dramaturgy, and theoretical
Unthinking survivalism: Inner climate change
Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas
The scale and complexity of climate change, as well as its often incremental and unspectacular nature, pose formidable obstacles to dramatic representation. Wallace Shawn’s recent play Grasses of a Thousand Colors subtly distorts the conventions of the thesis play, or drama of ideas, to reveal the habits of mind that are responsible for our species’ steady progress towards ecological disaster. A ‘drama of bad ideas’ for the Anthropocene, the play…
The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance
The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooesis and Performance
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres: Technology and Performance
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
Dis-Anthropocentric Performance: The Climate Lens Playbook
How might performance contribute to a reversal of the social values and political systems that have produced climate chaos, plunging countless species into crisis and catastrophe? What recognitions would such a reversal require? What misrecognitions must it defeat
LeAnn Fields and University of Michigan Press
In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate …
Art (16 works) · Sociology (14 works) · History (13 works) · History (13 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Literature (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Drama (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works)