Performance Studies

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of 40, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible.

The Rainbow Age of Television explores why queer people are so invested in—and conflicted by—the kinds of storytelling that TV has to offer. Above all, it's a celebration of the LGBTQIA+ shows, their characters, and their creators that define this new age in television.

Theatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending.

Helen Hayes, acclaimed "First Lady of the American Theatre", has been on stage, screen, and television for more than fifty years. In that time she moved among the world's most famous and talented: actors, film stars, writers, businessmen. She speaks with wit, wisdom, and candor on topics both public and private.

Super Black places the appearance of black superheroes alongside broad and sweeping cultural trends in American politics and pop culture, which reveals how black superheroes are not disposable pop products, but rather a fascinating racial phenomenon through which futuristic expressions and fantastic visions of black racial identity and symbolic political meaning are presented.

All of the greatest creators, from Beethoven to Edison, had something in common. They didn't just create stuff. They created a ton of stuff. That's why I'm a big believer that producers should produce more, directors should direct more, and, of course, writers should write more. The funny thing is, too many writers I know just can't finish a script. Maybe they have ideas, and maybe they write a few scenes, but they don't get to the end. Or maybe they've never written anything and are too afraid to start! That's why I wrote this book.

Halloween in Isla Vista, an un-sponsored annual street party, attracts an estimated average of 20,000 revelers into a minuscule, 1.5 square mile area each year. Yet it has been consistently dismissed by UCSB administrators, the police, and local press as a dangerous frivolity, unworthy of critical inquiry. Until now, this complex cultural performance has remained buried under three decades’ worth of rumor, assumption, and enforced silence. This book breaks that silence, exploring the event’s history through archival sources and oral histories, providing an in-depth reading of the ...

Movies do more than tell a good story. They are expressions of raw emotion, naked vulnerability, and unbridled rage. They often function in the same way as prayers, communicating our deepest longings and joys to a God who hears each and every one. In this captivating book, Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen brings a critic's unique perspective to how movies function as expressions to God of lament, praise, joy, confession, and more.

In The Exception to the Rulers, award-winning journalists Amy and David Goodman expose the lies, corruption, and crimes of the power elite, an elite bolstered by large media conglomerates. Her goal is “to go where the silence is, to give voice to the silenced majority.” This audiobook includes numerous archival audio excerpts, including statements from filmmaker Michael Moore, civil liberties victims describing their harrowing ordeals in the United States after 9/11, and more.

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of forty, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible.

For almost a decade, Richard Herring has been answering sexist trolls on International Women's Day when they ask 'when is International Men's Day?' in the mistaken belief there isn't one. If only the trolls had learned to use Google they'd realise that there is an International Men's Day - it's on November 19th. In The Problem with Men Richard expands on his Twitter discussions and tackles some of the big questions surrounding the problems of toxic masculinity - for women, but also for men.

With an in-depth look at the two most empowering years in the life of Marilyn Monroe, The Girl details how The Seven Year Itch created an icon and sent the star on an adventure of self-discovery and transformation from a controlled wife and contract player into a businesswoman and unlikely feminist whose power is still felt today. When Marilyn Monroe stepped over a subway grating as The Girl in The Seven Year Itch and let a gust of wind catch the skirt of her pleated white dress, an icon was born.

Ever since he became a Christian at the age of 40, it has been Poirot actor David Suchet's dream to make an audio recording of the Bible. In between filming the final episodes of Poirot, David Suchet spent over 200 hours in the recording studio to create the very first full-length audio version of the NIV Bible spoken by a single British actor. This recording is an excerpt of that Bible. This audio Bible is also available as an app.

In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover? Storming the City analyzes the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-20th century.

Forty-eight stories of brave sparrows, wilds winds, and how to live in times of climate change. A prize-winning book by the natural storyteller Georgiana Keable, sharing long experience with children in the forests and snows of Norway. Meet the girl who became a fish, married a bear, and had a tree as her mum and dad. Meet the boy who tried to stop the wind, fetched fire from the center of the earth on the back of a bird, and whose father was the river.

In this lively study of both modern film and stage productions of Shakespeare, Samuel Crowl provides fascinating insights into the ways in which these productions have been influenced by one another as well as by contemporary developments in critical approaches to Shakespeare's plays. Written in a style which places a premium on capturing the vivid and often dazzling moments of stage and film performances of Shakespeare, Crowl's study will be of interest to the avid film and theatergoer as well as to the scholar and student.

Pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made more than 60 films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity, as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese, and more generally, “Oriental” women between 1925 and 1940. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong’s life and work as a consummate artist, and positions the actress as a historical and cultural entrepreneur who rewrote categories of representation.

A groundbreaking look at the history of transgender representation in TV and film, by an of-the-moment and in-demand culture reporter. Narrated by Tre'vell Anderson, WE SEE EACH OTHER is a personal history of trans visibility since the beginning of moving images. A literary reckoning, it unearths a transcestry that's long existed in plain sight and in the shadows of history's annals, and further contextualizes our present moment of increased representation.

Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.

In Buffoon Men: Classic Hollywood Comedians and Queered Masculinity, Scott Balcerzak reads the performances of notable comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello through humor and queer theory to expose a problematic history of maleness in their personas.