Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Martina Herman ’26 is an undergraduate concentrating in Comparative Literature and Literary Arts. Working primarily in Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese, she is interested in the intersections between contemporary dance and political philosophy. She is interested in thinking about how gesture, movement, and circulation pathways can become locations for intersubjectivity. In her thesis, tentatively titled “Choreographies of Power: Dance, Policing, and Political Agency Across the Post-Modern Tradition,” she seeks to analyze how the performative quality of dance, and the kinesthetic dimension that shapes it, become a location of agency within choreography that breaks away from a logic of policing. In its allocation of roles and functions to bodies and their distribution through space, policing is essentially choreographic and affects the nature of contemporary intersubjective connection and social interaction. Tracing the disruptive-performative-political quality of movement, Herman’s project will compare how artists from Brazil, USA, Australia, and Europe digest notions of the political to craft new pathways of circulation, allocation of space and intersubjective relations. Her other research interests include Jewish thought, postmemory, post-structuralism, ecopoetics, and reading practices. Her artistic practice in dance and poetry also focuses on the intersections of language and the body.