Amy Swanson (she/any) is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies, Theory, and History. Her research bridges dance studies, performance studies, and queer African studies with a focus on contemporary dance and performance in Senegal. Swanson’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the NEH, and the University of Oregon’s Office of the Provost and Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation. Before joining the University of Oregon, Swanson taught at Colgate University, and before that, at Northwestern University, where she received her PhD and MA. Currently, Swanson serves as Vice President of Conferences with the Dance Studies Association.

Swanson’s research focuses specifically on African artists’ navigations and recalibrations of the power asymmetries inherent to the transnational contemporary dance circuit and the ways in which the artists challenge repressive systems in their localities. Her writing has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, African Studies Review, and Critical African Studies. Her book, Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal(forthcoming, University of Michigan Press), examines queer aesthetics in contemporary dance in Senegal in relation to artists’ embeddedness in both local and transnational artistic circuits. Swanson’s ongoing research explores Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring performed by a cast of thirty-eight dancers from fourteen African countries. She is also working on a project that investigates the political potential of contemporary performance in public spaces across urban Africa.

• PhD, Northwestern University
• MA, Northwestern University
• BFA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Monograph

• Dancing Opacity: Contemporary Dance, Transnationalism, and Queer Possibility in Senegal(forthcoming, University of Michigan Press)

Articles

• “The Art of Disruption: Decolonial Potentiality in Fatou Cissé’s La ville en mouv’ment.” African Studies Review (2024)
• “Ambiguous Masculinities: Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men,” Dance Research Journal (2019)
• “Codifying African Dance: The Germaine Acogny Technique and Antimonies of Postcolonial Cultural Production,” Critical African Studies (2019)
• “Choreographing the Individual: Andréya Ouamba’s Contemporary (African) Dance Approach,” Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, (2016)