
Contact Information
Fields of Interest
Biography
Biography
Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington, where she served as Divisional Dean of the Arts from 2016-2022. Her book Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020), on dance and live art in contemporary South Africa and beyond, received a 2021 Special Citation for the Dance Studies Association's de la Torre Bueno Prize. Cole's previous books include Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010), the co-edited book Africa After Gender? (2007), and Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001), a finalist for African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize and ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt book award. Cole has published dozens of articles as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. Her disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat toured North America in 2002-2005. She received the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award, fellowships from the National Humanities Center Fellowship, Harvard Theatre Collection, and AAUW, and grants from the Mellon Foundation, Freie Universität Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fund for U.S. Artists.
Cole is the recipient of a 2024-25 UW Royalty Research Fund Grant and Kreilsheimer and Jones Large Grant for her current project, "Difference, Differently: Tejumola Olaniyan and the Practice of Global Black Cultural Studies."
On her book Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice:
- Reviews
- National Humanities Center Virtual Book Club, February 2021, video
- UW Katz Distinguished Lecture, January 2022, video
- NYU Panel with South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza, March 2022, video
Documentary on Ghana's Concert Party, "Stageshakers" that Cole co-created with Kwame Braun.
Research
Selected Research
- Catherine M. Cole, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, University of Michigan Press, 2020
- Africa After Gender? co-edited with Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan Miescher, Indiana University Press, 2007
- Catherine M. Cole, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre, Indiana University Press, 2001.
- Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition, Indiana University Press, 2010
Courses Taught
Autumn 2024
Winter 2024
Autumn 2023
Spring 2021
- Spring 2024, DANCE 356 A: Dance, Culture, and Colonization
- Winter 2024, DANCE 355 A: Dance, Power, and Globalization
- Spring 2022, DANCE 355 A: Dance, Power, and Globalization
- Winter 2020, DRAMA 367 A: African Theatre and Performance
- Winter 2019, DRAMA 586 A: Seminar in Dramatic Theory
- Winter 2018, DRAMA 494 A: Special Studies in Theatre and Drama: African Theatre and Performance
- Spring 2017, DRAMA 587 A: Seminar In Dramatic Theory: Performance in and from the Global South