Stephanie Batiste
Professor
- Education:
- Ph.D., American Studies, George Washington University
- M. Phil., American Studies, George Washington University
- A.B., Cum Laude, Sociology, minor in African American Studies
Stephanie Leigh Batiste is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she is also Affiliate Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Theater and Dance, and Comparative Literature. Dr. Batiste served as the Acting Chair of the UCSB Black Studies Department, was a Co-PI on the Consortium for Black Studies programming and research grant, and serves as the Director of the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. She is co-editor of the NYU Press Book Series Performance and American Cultures.
Dr. Batiste’s research areas include Race and Racism, Performance Studies, African American Literature and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and U.S. History. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in Text & Performance Quarterly, The Black Scholar, The New Centennial Review, International Journal of Screen Dance, and The Journal of Haitian Studies as well as other collections and anthologies.
Dr. Batiste’s first book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) won the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize and honorable mention for the Association for Theater in Higher Education Book Award. Darkening Mirrors focuses on the relationship between power and identity in black performance cultures. Its investigation of imperial representation in interwar performance reimagines Black subjectivity and national belonging as an engagement with dominant historical systems of thought. Imperial structures that defined identity, modernism, and national power like primitivism and expansion relied on raced subjects and racialized relationships that served as a tool of oppression for people of color. Batiste critiques the operation of blackness and post-coloniality as critical positions in scholarship on race, challenging notions of abjection and subalternity in order to reassess Black relationships to self and power.
Professor Batiste’s latest book project SpacesBetween: Resurrective Aesthetics in Black Millennial Performance (NYU Press) focuses on the ways performances generate and theorize feeling and community belonging around experiences of violence and death in millennial Los Angeles’ Black performance cultures. Addressing in-community artistry and meaning making around loss and grief, SpacesBetween reveals embedded structures of transformation in performance’s confrontations with violence.
Dr. Batiste is a poet, performer, and playwright. Her poems have been published in The Offing and Foundry. Her solo show Stacks of Obits and plays Blue Gold & Butterflies, and Young Love Found & Lost: 6 poems in a circle have been performed nationally and internationally.
Before coming to UCSB, Dr. Batiste taught and researched at Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A historian, she served as project supervisor for the Smithsonian Institution’s Afro-American Communities Project housed at the National Museum of American History, conducted research for the National and Historical Parks Public History Project, and was a consultant and Park Ranger for the National Park Service.
Research Areas
- American and African American Literatures
- Black Science Fiction
- c. 1860-present
- Cultural and Performance Theory
- Creative Writing and/or Performance
- Postcolonial, Migration, and/or Diaspora Studies
Selected Publications
“Dunham Possessed: Ethnographic Bodies, Movement, and Transnational Constructions of Blackness.” Journal of Haitian Studies. 13.2 (2007).
“Krump Time,” Thomas DeFrantz, ed., Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies, Oxford University Press, 2026.
South LA Literature, in Los Angeles: A Literary History, Michael Joseph Docherty and Ignacio López-Calvo, Cambridge University Press, 2026.
Blk-as-Tek | echo::system and Black Performance Technologies, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Movement & Computing, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, United States, Article No.:1, Pages 1-9, 27 June 2024.
Performance of [a beating], The Offing: A Literary Magazine, July 2024. Directed by Margit Edwards.
Young Love Found & Lost: 6 poems in a circle (revised), Sally Kitch and Dawn Gilpin, eds., CounterAct: Arts and Activism Confronting Sexual Violence, Sally Kitch and Dawn Gilpin, eds. University of Washington Press, 2024, 69-79.
“My’s Silent Scream: Memory, Traumatic Time, and the Embodiment of the Black Surreal in Rickerby Hinds’s Dreamscape,” The New Centennial Review, Fall 2018.
“Performance,” Essay, Keywords in African American Studies, Erica Edwards, Roderick Ferguson, Jeffrey Okbar, eds., New York University Press, 2018, 136-141.
“Intimate Visualities: Intimacy as Social Critique and Radical Possibility in Kyle Abraham and Carrie Schneider’s Dance Response Project’s I am Sold and Blood on the Leaves,” International Journal of Screen Dance, Volume 9, June 2018. http://screendancejournal.org/article/view/6400#.XBPwhSd7nUI
“Aquanova: Collapsing time in the lives of Bridgforth’s delta dandi,” in Solo/Black/Woman: performing global traditions and local interventions, E. Patrick Johnson and Ramon Rivera Servera, eds., Northwestern University Press, November 2013.
“Affect-ive Moves: Violence, space, and the body in RIZE’s krump dancing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Melissa Blanco-Borelli, ed., Oxford University Press, December 2013.
Stacks of Obits: a performance piece, Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory 29, (2005): 105-125.
Stephanie Batiste's Bookshelf
Courses Taught
- QuarterCourse #Title