University of Iowa Professor Rebekah Kowal has published a new book, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Oxford University Press). The book is co-edited by Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin.

From the Oxford website:

"Assembling research from an international cohort of scholars dedicated to inquiry in the field, this volume investigates relationships between dance and politics, adding detail and dimension to existing research, illuminating epistemological and theoretical topographies, and forging new pathways for related inquiry. Opening up its critical terms in two directions, the project illuminates how dance achieves its politics and how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance. Conceiving the subject matter in mutually informing ways, through problematics that come from philosophy, social science, humanities, and history, the authors seek to participate in an ongoing conversation that is both interdisciplinary and international in scope. This Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics comes through a turn to dance from within a range of fields such as political philosophy, interests in social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, critical race, and queer studies. The editors have brought together writers with intimate engagement in these dialogues and close encounter with various dance practices. The result is a book that is at once essential reading for advanced teaching and research within various dance studies curricula and that intervenes in key discussions of political theory in the current climate."

Kowal is an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Dance, part of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.