Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Sarah Wilbur, has recently published her first book through Wesleyan University Press.
Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts is the first scholarly manuscript to focus on the shaping influence of federal dance funding on the working livelihoods of three generations of US dance artists. Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the continuing struggle to achieve equitable resource distribution and parity of opportunity in American dance.
The book was released in October and is available in hardback and paper back the press and local retailers. Funding from Duke University Libraries made possible a free e-copy, available through a creative commons license here.
Dance Program
