Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Teaching Performance Studies is the first organized treatment of performance studies theory, practice, and pedagogy. This collection of eighteen essays by leading scholars and educators reflects the emergent and contested nature of performance studies, a field that looks at the broad range of human performance from everyday conversation to formal theatre and cultural ritual. The cross-disciplinary freedom enacted by the writers suggests a new vision of performance studies—a deliberate commerce between field and classroom.

Nathan Stucky is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Speech Communication at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has edited Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies and has served as the chair of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association and on the executive board of Performance Studies International.

Cynthia Wimmer has taught courses in playwriting and performance theory at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is a founding member of the Performance Studies Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and is the former chair of the American Drama Panel of NEMLA.

Teaching Performance Studies “recounts a wide variety of teaching methods, experiences, theories, and approaches. All of it fits under the big performance studies tent. . . . An elusive, playful, embodied, multifaceted, protean operation: Teaching performance studies is very much a creative art.”

—Richard Schechner, from the Foreword