Embedded Files
Embodying Histories is a series of online seminars exploring cross-disciplinary perspectives on embodied knowledge, research and practice in historical fields. The contributors come from across the fields of history, english, historical martial arts, theatre and performance, and draw on a wide range of methods, theories, epistemologies and practical expertise. The aim of the seminars is to promote dialogue and connections between historical performance research in music and its parallels in other fields.
Embodying Histories is funded by the Baermann's Body project and hosted in collaboration with the University of York's Historical Practice Research Network and School of Arts and Creative Technologies, and the Performance and Embodiment cluster at the Orpheus Instituut Gent.
The seminars are free and open to anyone to attend. They will comprise a mixture of presentation and discussion.
Details of each session and registration links are given below.
Wednesday 21 January 2026, 4pm GMT
Lauren Mancia (Brooklyn College/City University of New York)
Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method
Historians are deeply invested in texts, written archives, and historical methods, claiming they allow scholars to be as objective as possible when analyzing the past. This commitment is particularly heightened for scholars of Religious Studies, who seek to distinguish themselves from the biased, committed religious practitioners who used to regularly write religious history before 1950. But the devotional repertoire that historical people embodied and practiced was felt and lived, and often not written down--and it should not be ignored by historians of religion. In her most recent work, medievalist Lauren Mancia proposes that historians cannot solely rely on texts to understand premodern monks and nuns--scholars must also explore these histories through embodiment and performance. Come learn about the scholarly stakes, pitfalls, and histories of this kind of work, especially as it pertains to the particular context of 1000-year-old Christian monastic communities; together, we'll even try out Mancia's proposed method, reperforming some medieval monastic actions together.
Lauren Mancia is Professor of History at Brooklyn College, CUNY and Professor of Medieval Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center. A scholar of medieval monastic devotion in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries, she is the author of Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019); Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God (2023); and Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method (2025).
During this session, Mancia will discuss her 2025 Cambridge Element monograph Embodied Epistemology as Rigorous Historical Method. Attendees are invited (though not required) to explore the publication in advance of the session. For those who do not have access through an institution, there is an option to request a copy direct from the author when registering for the session.
Monday 16 February 2026, 4pm GMT
Evelyn Tribble (University of Connecticut)
"The Genius of the System": Cognitive ecologies, embodied practices, and early modern playing
This presentation will examine early modern playing practices as elements of a cognitive ecosystem that underpins group creativity, including emergent company practices, especially apprenticeship; embodied skills of dance, gesture, and swordfighting; and the relationship of fictive and physical space. I will include an example of an instance of Shakespeare's deliberate revision of a part for a young actor (Robin in Merry Wives of Windsor). I conclude with some preliminary suggestions about the interplay of creativity and constraint through a brief consideration of an analogous system of group creativity: the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s.
Evelyn Tribble is a Professor of English and the Associate Dean for Humanities and Undergraduate Affairs, at UConn. Her research interests center around Shakespeare, performance, memory, and skill. She explores theatrical history through the lens of Distributed Cognition, asking how Shakespeare’s company met the astonishing cognitive demands of their profession, particularly the performance of up to six different plays a week.
Wednesday 18 March 2026, 4pm GMT
Daniel Jacquet (University of Chicago)
Daniel Jaquet is a current Fulbright Scholar in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. A medievalist with a background in literary studies and interests in history of science and material culture in the early modern period, he specializes in martial arts studies, with specific interest into the production, transmission, and reception of embodied knowledge in the past. His current project is looking into the development of physical exercises in the United States (1820-1920), especially the reception of Swedish Gymnastics and its influence in the United States.
Wednesday 22 April 2026, 4pm GMT
Ben Spatz (University of Birmingham) and Webster McDonald (University of Kansas)
Unsettling Archives: Critical Fabulation and Historically Informed Performance
Ben Spatz (they/he) is Assistant Professor in Creative Practice in the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. They are an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner focussing on critical approaches to embodied and artistic research, and experiments in diasporic and decolonial jewishness. Ben has written several books and founded the videographic Journal of Embodied Research.
Dr Webster B. McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Kansas. He is an artist-scholar-educator who theorizes a “BlackQueer” Jamaican postcolonial subjectivity to unsettle normative cultural formations, including colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. McDonald’s artistic and theory-infused work includes Critical Decolonial Monodrama Performance (CDMP) and the staging of archival documents. He has published essays in Caribbean intellectual traditions and Black queer theory. His current book project, Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Performance of Black and Queer Life in Jamaica, considers “archival weight” as both metaphor and material reality—that is, the weight of history bearing down on the body, embedded in the state, and circulating in/through cultural formations.
Page updated
Report abuse