Member News – Alexis Riley

ATDS Memember Alexis Riley was recently selected for the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. Below is an excerpt from the press release, but you can find the full press release here. 

As a PPFP fellow, her archival research will examine how disabled people at Oregon State Hospital in the postwar era mobilized dance criticism to document and contest the conditions of their confinement.

Her use of performance research methods offers new avenues to historians of medical incarceration grappling with the limits of state hospital archives, while uncovering minoritarian performance cultures underrepresented in theater, dance and performance studies.

The research she conducts also will form the basis of a devised performance presented at the end of her tenure. Alexis will work with Petra Kuppers in SMTD’s Department of Theatre and Drama.