Addie Clark Harding Professor, Department of Germanic Studies, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, and the College.

Since joining the faculty at Chicago, I have taught courses in German Cinema (e.g., Weimar Cinema; German Cinema 1945-1989; Fassbinder: Melodrama, Politics, and Poetics; The Cinema of Catastrophe), on theories of spectacle; performance theory; and the intersections of cinema, theater, and opera. Recently, my research and teaching have been organized around questions of performance and spectatorship, especially the institutional and ideological histories of absorption. In addition to my academic work, I have spent a number of years working as a dramaturg, mostly in Germany, (e.g., at the Frankfurt Opera, the Bremen Opera, and the Frankfurt Ballet) but also, more recently, at Lyric Opera of Chicago and for opera cabal, an avant-garde opera company based in New York and Chicago. For the past five years, I have served as the executive editor of the Opera Quarterly(published by Oxford University Press). From 2007-2010, I served as Co-Director of the M.A. Program in the Humanities at Chicago. In the Spring of 2010, Christopher Wild and I hosted "Praxes of Theory", an international conference at Chicago that brought together artists and scholars form Berlin and Chicago to explore the intersections of performance practice and performance theory. The conference inaugurated a multi-year cooperation with the Institute for Theater Studies at the Free University Berlin.  In the Summer of 2011, I was named the inaugural Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Before joining the faculty at Chicago, I taught at Columbia University, where I served on the faculties in Germanic Languages, Theatre, and Gender Studies. In my last two years at Columbia, I served as co-chair, with Rosalind Morris, of the Columbia Seminar on Cinema & Interdisciplinary Interpretation.