VK Preston
Assistant Professor, History
Phone: | (514) 848-2424 ext. 2407 |
Email: | vk.preston@concordia.ca |
Website(s): |
http://vkpreston.org |

Photo credit: Tristan Brand
Research activities
Grants
SSHRC-IDG: New Directions in Seventeenth-Century Performance Research: Intangible Baroques
Connaught New Faculty
Mellon Foundation-Stanford Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Canada Council for the Arts (Theatre)
Teaching activities
The Baroque HIST 398/2 E
HUMA 888 (Methods): Embodiment
This doctoral course brings interdisciplinary conversations on embodiment, cultural production, and methods into shared focus. It takes up questions on embodiment traversing disciplines in the arts,humanities, and social sciences. This course’s aim is to support graduate-level research projects and shape interdisciplinary conversation, promoting reflection on the scope and outcome of methods. In keeping with this goal, this term’s readings support conversations on practice and perception. We’ll investigate key texts on technique and methodology, addressing frameworks of appropriation, the body, decolonization, gesture, the senses, and media. The course emphasizes intersectional and social dimensions of experience; it traces interdisciplinary discourse traversing queer and critical race studies, ageing, dis/ability, gender, and feminist research. The aim of the course is to explore arguments regarding the concept of embodiment in writing on kinesthetics, theories of capital, illness, movement, ontology, and resistance. Coursework includes attending to movement-based practice and tasks’ imbrication in art and everyday life. It draws in particular from dance, performance, and movement studies as well as research on historical trauma and the body that addresses both theory and practice.
Publications
Selected Publications
Preston, VK. 2021. “Sitting on a Man's Head: Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church, New York, NY,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43 (3), ed. Benjamin Gillespie, 39–42.
Preston, VK. 2020. “Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis,” Theatre Journal 72 (2), ed. EJ Westlake,143-162. (Honourable mention: Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize, ASTR)
Preston, VK. 2020. “Performance, Climate, and Critical Art,”Theatre Journal 72 (2), ed. Margherita Laera, E-7-E-13.
Preston, VK. 2020. “Convening Muses and Turning Tables: Reimagining a Danced Politics of Time in Jordan Bennett and Marc Lescarbot.” Futures of Dance Studies (Studies in Dance History). Eds. Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 269-285
Preston, VK. 2018. “Reproducing Witchcraft: Thou Shalt Not Perform a Witch to Live,” TDR / The Drama Review (62)1 (T237). Special issue: on reproduction. Ed., Rebecca Schneider. 143-159.
Preston, VK. 2017. “Baroque Relations: Performing Silver and Gold in Daniel Rabel’s Ballets of the Americas.” In The Oxford Handbook of Reenactment. Ed., Mark Franko. New York: Oxford University Press, 285-310. (Gertrude Lippincott Award for best essay from the Dance Studies Association)
Contributor to Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (2017), ed. Dan Sack. New York: Routledge.
Preston, VK. 2016. “A Dictionary in the Archives:Translating and Transcribing Silenced Histories in French and Wendat.” Performance Research 21(5), Trans/Performance, special issue, ed. Amelia Jones), 85-88.
Preston, VK. 2015. “How Do I Touch This Text?: Or, the Interdisciplines Between, Dance and Theatre in Early Modern Archives.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. Ed., Nadine George-Graves. New York: Oxford University Press, 56-89.
Thain, Alanna and VK Preston. 2013. “Tendering the Flesh:the ABC’s of Dave St-Pierre’s Contemporary Utopias,” TDR / The Drama Review57(4), 28-51.
Events and Public-Facing Work
"Dancing Dissent," Between, Across, and Throughpodcast hosted by Keven Lewis O'Neill and the Centre for Diaspora &Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Indelible Refusal: Bodies, Performances, and WalkingResistance, with Stephanie Springgay (OISE)https://walkinglab.org/indelible-refusal/