The Routledge Dance Studies Reader Giersdorf, Jens; Wong, Yutian and O'Shea, Janet

A 400-page anthology that maps the intellectual terrain of dance studies as it evolved from ethnography and anthropology into its own interdisciplinary field. Editors Jens Giersdorf, Yutian Wong, and Janet O'Shea have curated essays that grapple with movement as cultural practice — how bodies signify across borders, how colonial histories shape choreography, how dance becomes protest or preservation. You'll find foundational texts alongside contemporary scholarship on everything from classical Indian dance to hip-hop, from ballet's imperial legacy to queer performance theory. The writing ranges from the academic to the activist, but all of it treats dance as serious intellectual work, not just spectacle. Essential for dance students, but equally valuable for anyone interested in how bodies move through space and history. This is the reader that legitimized dance as worthy of the same scholarly attention as literature or visual art.