PhD Humanities: Homecoming reunion

Sandra Huber, Phd 22, is an educator, researcher, and writer. She holds an extended-term appointment in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University where she is Area Head of Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in Fine Arts (FFAR 248 + 249). She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia, where she joined Media Studies, Anthropology, and Fine Arts to look at the methods and epistemologies of contemporary witchcraft. She has published and presented on witchcraft, magic, sleep, and dreams in the area of poetics, cinema, media histories, and contemporary art. You can find her at sandrahuber.com.

Craig Morrison, PhD 00,  is an ethnomusicologist, author, teacher, and musician. A graduate of the Humanities PhD program in 2000, his thesis was entitled “Psychedelic Music in San Francisco: Style, Context, and Evolution.” From Victoria BC, Morrison settled in Montreal in 1984. He taught courses on popular music and culture at Concordia for more than two decades. Now retired from university teaching, he remains active as a lecturer, performer with the band Vintage Wine, and writing his third book, an expansion of his PhD research on the folk revival foundations of folk rock, garage rock and psychedelic music.  Craig Morrison, nicknamed “The Rocking Professor,” has produced and performed his annual Roots of Rock and Roll Concert 24 times at Concordia’s Oscar Peterson Concert Hall. 

Natalie Doonan, PhD 16, is a new media and performance artist, writer and educator. She works at the intersection of visual art, sensory studies, performance studies and cultural geography. Her research focuses on food and the senses, technology, and the vitality of places. Natalie’s work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally. Her writing has appeared in professional and peer reviewed art and food culture publications. She serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal.

Amanda Gutiérrez

Amanda Gutiérrez (b. 1978, Mexico City) explores the experience of political listening and gender studies by bringing into focus soundwalking practices. Trained and graduated as a stage designer from The National School of Theater, Gutiérrez uses a range of digital media tools to investigate everyday life, aural agencies, and collective identities. Approaching these questions from aural perspectives continues to be of particular interest to Gutiérrez, who completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently elaborating on the academic dimension of her work as a PhD candidate in the Arts and Humanities Doctoral program. 

Her experience as an artist has been shown internationally in art residencies such as FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her sound artwork has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Harvestworks in NYC, SBC Gallery, Undefined Radio in Montreal, and Errant Bodies Studio Press in Berlin. Her soundwalks have been featured in POP Montreal, City of Women Festival in Ljubljana, ToPOT festival, and ENSEMS Music Festival in Valencia. 

Research

The research creation project Los Pasos de Mama Killa was informed by the cultural, political, and historical context of the Andinean territory, presented at the sound festival ‘Sur Aural’ 2024 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The field research was embodied as a workshop and developed as part of the festival creative residencies, taking into consideration an artistic approach to co-creation with women and gender minorities inhabiting Cochabamba. This workshop and artistic project was produced with members of the Bolivian community radio collective, ‘Fuga Radial’ and explored exercises of Deep Listening, counter-mapping, and technical aspects of sound production to develop a sound augmented reality walk.

Magdalena Hutter 

Magdalena Hutter is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. A graduate of the University of Television and Film Munich, she has been making films since 2007 and teaching filmmaking since 2012. In her documentary film work, her focus is on projects about art and artists, as well as on themes of belonging. In her teaching she has worked with groups of diverse ages, ranging from teenagers to older adults, with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking as empowerment for queer and refugee youth. As a HUMA PhD candidate, Magdalena uses her film practice to do research-creation about fatness as method in dance and movement art and to develop frameworks for a Fat ScreenDance. She is an affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and a member of the Textiles & Materiality research cluster at the Milieux Institute. Magdalena is supervised by MJ Thompson, PhD, Nadia Myre, and Stefanie Snider, PhD.

Research

Magdalena’s doctoral research investigates the performance and representation of fatness in dance and movement art, the potentials of fatness in these art forms, and how they may be transported by and contribute to the artistic vocabulary of a Fat ScreenDance. Her work is rooted in the conviction that fatness has the potential to question and challenge categories and structures—categories of knowledge in dance and film, but also structures implicated in the representation, valuation oppression of bodies more broadly—while offering new visions of materiality and method to contemporary screendance.

Using documentary film, conversations, and movement research, Magdalena works with fat performers to highlight the knowledge their respective practices can offer, as well as the knowledge that emerges when these practices are brought into conversation with her own work in film, particularly with handheld cinematography as improvised choreography. In addition to the written dissertation, this process will result in a series of short documentary films.

David Morris 

My main interests are in phenomenology (esp. Merleau-Ponty) with a focus on the philosophy of the body, mind and nature in relation to current biology and science. My other interests include Hegel (in relation to 19th century German Idealism), Bergson, and ancient (esp. Aristotle) and modern philosophy.

I am currently studying the problem of the genesis of meaning and sense, in relation to biological and perceptual phenomena. This has led me to my book, Merleau-Ponty's Developmental Ontology, published by Northwestern University Press, in their Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Series, winner of the 2020 Edwin Ballard Prize, awarded by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology for an outstanding book in phenomenology. This book focuses on issues of development and ontology in Merleau-Ponty, in relation to current science, and advances my work on the problem of the genesis of meaning. In turn, this has led to my current book project, on Time, Meaning, and Nature, which pursues new ways of conceptualizing time (and also place) so as to arrive at a new view of meaning as at once intrinsically arising with nature, yet contingently so. This also leads to new ways of thinking about nature.

See my Academia.edu site for my publications; many of my recent ones are on phenomenology or Merleau-Ponty in relation to contemporary biology and other sciences. My book The Sense of Space was published by SUNY Press in 2004. I am co-editor, with Kym Maclaren, of the collection Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of Self.

I served as Chair of Philosophy from 2010-17 (with a sabbatical in 2014-15). In 2017 I received a Concordia Emerging Academic Leadership Award (Track 1) from the Office of the Provost. I am currently General Secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, on the Executive of Committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a member of the Advisory Editorial Board of Continental Philosophy Review, and the editorial board of Concordia University Press. I am currently Graduate Program Director of the Humanities PhD program.

Mark Sussman 

Mark Sussman is a theatre artist and scholar working on the animation of public space, material dramaturgies, puppetry and object performance, and the integration of old and new technologies in live performance.  He earned MA and PhD degrees from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, receiving the Michael Kirby Memorial Award for his doctoral dissertation on 18th and 19th Century stagings of the new technology of electricity. He joined Concordia's faculty and moved to Montreal in 2005. For six years he held the position of Associate Dean, Academic Affairs in the Faculty of Fine Arts and is now a Professor in the Department of Theatre. He also advises graduate students in the PhD Humanities and Individualized interdisciplinary programs.

In Summer, 2020, he was appointed director of Concordia's Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. A joint creation of the Faculties of Arts and Science and Fine Arts, the Centre provides a gathering place for researchers, graduate students, and guest speakers from across the humanities and arts. The Centre sponsors several Working Groups each year, and funds events in collaboration with individual researchers and research centres housed in the two Faculties.

Prior to teaching at Concordia, he has taught at New York University (Performance Studies, UG Drama), Barnard College (Theater), Wesleyan University (Theater), CalArts (Theater, Critical Studies), UQÀM (DESS en arts de la marionnette contemporarin), and the Parsons School of Design at the New School (Architecture/Lighting Design). At Concordia, he has taught performance studies and studio-based courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, with a focus on such topics as performance and the contemporary city, material performance and performing objects, performance ethnography, puppetry, queer theatre, radio drama and sound arts, history of the avant-garde, dramaturgy, theatre history, and the epic theatre tradition. He has also led a number of Field School courses with students at the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, most recently in Summer, 2022

Sussman is a founder and co-artistic director of Great Small Works, an OBIE and UNIMA/Jim Henson Award-winning theatre collective based in New York City. Since 1995, Great Small Works has been producing new theatre works on a variety of scales, from miniature toy theatre pieces using two-dimensional cutouts and live montage, to giant parades, community processions, and circuses. The company specializes in the reinvention of ancient, popular, and avant-garde performance techniques in contemporary contexts, creating variety evenings, international festivals, and community-based projects in addition to discrete performance works featuring puppets and objects. With Great Small Works, he was artistic director for Bienvenue à Tourne-York, a large-scale outdoor carnival commissioned by the town of Tournefeuille, France (2009). He has also worked as a performer, designer, and producer for the company's ten International Toy Theater Festivals (1991-2013). He has led many workshops in the form of "toy" or "paper theatre," most recently with Feminismo Communitario Antipatriarcal in La Paz, Bolivia (2016), with Taichung University students and museum educators from the Tainan region of Taiwan (2019), and with professional artists through the Association Québécoise des Marionnettistes (AQM) in Montreal (2022).

As part of his ongoing research based at Concordia, and in collaboration with Roberto Rossi of Great Small Works, he is at work on a two new performance projects, one based on the writings of Robert Walser and another titled Tales from the Anthropocene, which had its premiere at the Dukketeaterfetival, Bornholm, Denmark (2015). Currently, Great Small Works is planning to tour the latest episode of their ongoing news serial, The Toy Theater of Terror As Usual, and recently completed Bluestone and My Mushroom: a choreography for fungi with commentaries on the arts of living on a damaged planet, at the Opus 40 sculpture park in Saugerties, NY (Summer, 2022)

Apart from Great Small Works, Sussman has collaborated as solo performer/puppeteer and lighting/set designer with writer/director Allen S. Weiss. With sound designer Gregory Whitehead, they have created Theater of the Ears / Théâtre des Oreilles (CalArts/LaMama/Charleville-Mézières/Paris/Avignon, 1999-2001) and Danse Macabre, an animated installation using dolls created by Paris-based artist Michel Nedjar at the Halle St. Pierre, Musee d'Art Brut, Paris (2004) and subsequently performed at the In Transit Festival, HKW, Berlin (2009) and the Centre Pompidou, Metz, France (2022).

In Montreal, he is the founder and member of the collective organizing Café Concret, an occasional cabaret of experimental puppetry and object-based performance, and a forum for new works in a variety of media. The 34th edition of Café Concret took place at Bâtiment 7 in Pointe-St-Charles (2020) and online editions were streamed via Facebook and YouTube during the pandemic years, 2020-22. Live outdoor editions have taken place at the MIAM in Outremont (2021) and at Bâtiment 7 (2022), with Anna Jane McIntyre as guest curator. Edition 44 is planned for Spring, 2023

In 2014, he was the Academic Convener for Manifest: Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas, the 9th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, bringing more than eight hundred artists, scholars, and activists from across the Americas to the Concordia campus and the city of Montreal.Sussman is a Co-Investigator of Hemispheric Encounters, a SSHRC Partnership group based at York University. He is a longstanding member of the Artistic Committee of Casteliers, the organization devoted to producing and diffusing the art of puppetry in Quebec and internationally; and in Fall, 2015 he joined the Board of Directors of Montreal's Studio 303.

Sussman's writing has appeared in TDR (The Drama Review), Connect, Stagebill, Cabinet, Radical Street Performance (Routledge, 1999), and Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects (MIT, 2001). His article "Notes on New Model Theaters" can be found in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014). An updated essay on New York's Circus Amok can be found in The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016). In 2018 and '19 he worked with the Café Concret collective on Moving Parts: Articulated Bodies and Objects in Performance, a three-part performance residency at Tangente, interdisciplinary symposium, and book project exploring the movement vocabularies shared across the fields of puppetry and dance. The symposium took place at Concordia's department of Theatre and the book, edited by Erin Hill and available on the Café Concret website, appeared in 2021.