Peer Research Advisors have the summers off. See you in the fall!
The Peer Research Advisors in Collins Library:
A Peer Research Advisor can:
Welcome to the course guide for SSI1-149: Transgressive Bodies. This guide will give you information about getting started with your research, suggested books, databases, and other media, and information on writing & citing. Please contact your librarian if you have any questions or need help!
In academic research, it's important to be able to distinguish between different types of sources. These differences often are contextual, meaning that a single source might fit in different categories depending on how you are using it and in what academic discipline you are writing.
Primary sources are the raw materials of scholarship.
Secondary sources report on or interpret primary sources.
Tertiary sources synthesize and present overviews of primary and secondary sources.
Scholarly sources present sophisticated, researched arguments using both primary and secondary sources and are written by experts.
Popular sources aim to inform or entertain and are intended for a general, non-specialized audience. In academic writing, popular sources most often are analyzed as primary sources.
These online collections will introduce you to a wealth of dictionaries and encyclopedias saving you hours of research time later on by helping you define and refine the parameters of your research question.
Here's what subject encyclopedias provide:
Primo is library search tool for finding materials in the Collins Library, Summit libraries and libraries worldwide. It includes books, ebooks, selected articles, images, videos, and more!
Examples of subject terms appear below. Copy and paste the terms in Primo's search box.
Modern Dance Political Aspects
Modern Dance Social Aspects
Modern Dance Philosophy
Modern Dance History 20th Century
Postmodern Dance
Ballet History
Sex in Dance
Women Dancers
Male Dancers
Dancers Biography
Choreographers Biography
Mary Wigman
Isadora Duncan
Alvin Ailey
Bill T. Jones
Serge Diaghilev
George Balanchine
Research typically begins with a topic that has piqued your curiosity. When you're researching a topic, you typically are interested in questions of who, what, where and when.
As you learn more about your chosen topic, however, you'll discover that scholars may have different approaches and arguments about the topic, and you'll start to ask your own research questions. Research questions typically begin with why or how:
Looking for the location of a print book?
Mary Wigman, Germany's premier dancer between the two world wars, envisioned the performer in the thrall of ecstatic and demonic forces. Widely hailed as an innovator of dance modernism, she never acknowledged her complex relationship with National Socialism.
This cultural study of modern dance icon Isadora Duncan is the first to place her within the thought, politics and art of her time.
In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning.
Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine, among the most influential artists of the 20th century, together created the music and movement for many ballet masterpieces. This is a study of one of the greatest artistic collaborations in history.
Note: Also available as an ebook
In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the Civil Rights struggle.
When using Primo, try these searching techniques:
In this book Dana Mills examines the political power of dance from a global perspective. Mills explores different dimensions of dance as a form of intervention into a politics more commonly articulated in words.
Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage is a spectacular and timely contribution to dance history, recasting canonical dance since the early nineteenth century in terms of a feminist perspective. Setting the creation of specific dances in socio-political and cultural contexts, Sally Banes shows that choreographers have created representations of women that are shaped by - and that in part shape - society's continuing debates about sexuality and female identity.
Dance's galvanizing and transformative presence in art and theory over the last decade becomes part of a broader investigation of its dialogue with modernism's legacies. This collection surveys the choreographic turn in the artistic imagination from the 1950s onwards, and in doing so outlines the philosophies of movement instrumental to the development of experimental dance.
Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?"
The volume is magisterial in scope, encompassing the history of theatrical dance from 1900 through 2000. Beginning with turn-of-the-century dancer-choreographers like Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Michel Fokine, and a bit later Vaslav Nijinsky, and proceeding through the profusion of dance styles performed today, the book provides an unparalleled view of dance in performance as it changed and grew in the twentieth century.
This penetrating analysis of one of the most extraordinary fads ever to strike America details how dance marathons manifested a potent from of drama. Between the two world wars they were a phenomenon in which working-class people engaged in emblematic struggles for survival.
A little-known episode in the history of dance that illuminates the broader subject of cultural policy during the Cold War era.
Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and migrant communities during the early twentieth century.
