Mindy Fenske

Assistant Professor
Office: 515 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2268
fenske@sc.edu

Current CV

Education

Ph.D. Louisiana State University, 2001

Specialization Areas

• Performance Studies
• Speech Communication

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information or click on highlighted courses for sample syllabli.

• SPCH 260: Argumentation and Debate
• SPCH 340: Oral Interpretation
• SPCH 411: Arguments in Cultural Studies
• SPCH 549: Rhetoric of Performance Texts
• SPCH 700: Issues and Methods in Speech Communication
• SPCH 749: Performance Studies in Communication

Scholarly Overview

My communication scholarship lies at the intersection between performance, cultural, and visual rhetorical studies.  I employ theories of performance and visual representation to critically investigate popular and historical multi-mediated representations of the human body.  My analyses focus on how identity (e.g. gender, class, nation, and race) is visually and discursively produced, performed, and constructed in order to explore possibilities for critical and social agency. My research thus combines two related interests. The first is the relationship between the concepts of performance, performativity, visuality, and agency as they circulate in, around, and through practices and representations of the human body.  The second concerns the methods and ethics of performance composition and criticism.  The engagement with the former produced my increasing investment in the latter. In pursuing my research into tattooed bodies and representation, for example, I have become convinced of the necessity and value of producing performative methods of criticism that are answerable to the history, form, and content of the objects and practices they analyze.  My work strives to conceptually ground and describe these innovative critical practices with explications of relevant theory and specific methods. 

My book, Tattoos in American Visual Culture, combines these interests in its analyses of the tattooed body and the discussion in the conclusion of critical agency.  Essays published in Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies also engage these issues in their discussions of performance ethics and critical method.

Current Research Project(s)

Current and future research projects that I am working on and contemplating include an edited collection of essays on performance criticism.  The goal of this collection will be to combine works of artist-scholars and critics who “do” performative/ experimental criticism with the writings of critics who address the theoretical and conceptual foundations and methodological descriptions of and for this criticism.  I am also in the beginning stages of a book-length project concerning the representation of sports and athletes. I envision the book delving into issues of gender, sexuality, race, and nation through the analysis of athletic participation and representation (athletes and fans, individuals and teams, local and larger media events) in multiple cultures.