Jill will discuss how her research into religious performance has entailed using her own body as a platform for dramaturgical analysis. Physical encounters with a performance generate strong sensations that constitute evidence of how that event makes religious meaning. Attending to how those sensations impact her body physically and then critically interrogating them has therefore been fundamental to Jill’s work. She will discuss how she has done this to illuminate sacred performances from the present and the historical past.
Jill Stevenson is a Professor of Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College. She earned her Ph.D. in Theatre from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (Palgrave, 2010) and Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in 21st-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2013). She co-edited the collection Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture (Boydell and Brewer, 2012) and has published articles in various journals and anthologies. She is currently co-editing a collection on the family home in performance.
