Conferences
Conferences serve as essential hubs for scholars and practitioners to share new work and ideas, and form creative and professional connections in the field. DSA presents large Annual Conferences oriented around a general theme, as well as smaller Special Topics Conferences that delve into a more limited area of focus.
Participants at Transmissions and Traces: Rendering Dance, the 2017 DSA Inaugural Conference
The Annual Conference is the principal international meeting point for all members of the Dance Studies Association. The conference program usually comprises some seventy sessions, presented over the course of four days. Papers, posters, roundtables, lecture-demonstrations, screendances and workshops are selected from abstracts sent in response to the conference call for papers through a blind peer review process. During the conference, working groups meet around their special interests, and DSA holds its Annual General Meeting as well as presents various awards and prizes. Professionalization workshops are offered for younger scholars and the social programme includes performances and parties. Graduate students are encouraged to attend and to apply for the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for outstanding papers, as well as for travel funds through the Graduate Student Travel Grant.
The Special Topics conferences are smaller, shorter gatherings around a specific issue, theme, or area of interest within dance scholarship. They do not follow an annual schedule, but are dependent on interested parties wishing to engage the membership of DSA.
Recipients of DSA awards receive complimentary conference attendance. Graduate students are encouraged to attend and apply for for travel funds through the Graduate Student Travel Grant.
future conferences
"Dancing in Common"
Dance Studies Association, August 8-11, 2019
Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois
Kate Elswit and Melissa Blanco Borelli, program co-chairs
Susan Manning, local arrangements chair
What might it mean to speak about “the common” or “the commons” in relation to dancing bodies? How do long-standing ideas about the common good and common property inflect past and present practices? What opportunities might dance and its concomitant registers of embodied exchange and identity offer in solidarity to emancipator modes of sociality? Thinking about our different experiences and understandings of the commons, we gather in Chicago to reflect, move and create.
“Dancing in Common” meets on the campus of Northwestern University on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Hotel Orrington and other conference hotels are just a few blocks away in Evanston, near public transportation to downtown Chicago and airports. Film screenings, club outings, and performances at Links Hall complement the wide range of panels, workshops, and plenaries planned for DSA 2019.
Submit your proposals by 15 January 2019. The online conference site will accept proposals after 15 August 2018.
Dance Studies Association welcomes proposals for future conferences. For further information on how to suggest a conference or to volunteer in the organization of DSA conferences, please see our guidelines and contact the Vice President for Conferences.
past conferences
Dance Studies Association continues the tradition of Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars. Peruse our past conferences below. For our published Conference Proceedings, see our Conference Proceedings.