Respondent: Diana Looser, Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford

My dissertation is on the subject of embodied Dominican world-making. I look at contemporary fiction by Dominican and Dominican-American writers and conduct ethnographic fieldwork at dance academies and social dance sites in the United States and the Dominican Republic in order to examine how Dominicans envision and enact alternative pasts, presents, and futures. I argue that the desiring body is the crucial mode through which worlds are made across both literature and dance. I consider these texts and ethnographic encounters through a phenomenological lens in order to examine the distinct configurations of this desiring body, and therefore the different kinds of possibilities it engenders, in fiction and social dance respectively.