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Julie Malnig

Professor
jmm2@nyu.edu
(212) 998-7311
406 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
Tuesday 2:00-4:00 (BY APPT)
Thursday 2:00-4:00 (BY APPT)

B.A., English, Douglass College, Rutgers University, Minor: Theatre Arts, 1977
M.A., Educational Theatre, New York University, 1980
Ph.D., Performance Studies, New York University, 1987

Julie Malnig is a cultural historian of theater and dance performance. Her areas of interest include social and popular dance; the history of popular entertainments; performance art; feminist performance and criticism; and performance writing. Among her courses at Gallatin are "Text and Performance: Approaches to Criticism and Creativity"; "Of Sylphs, Swans, and Swimmers: Writing About Dance"; "Popular Dance and American Cultural Identity"; and the Thesis Proposal Seminar in the Arts. She is the author of Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (NYU Press, 1995) and the editor of Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2009). She recently completed a manuscript on rock and roll dance, race, and youth culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Several of her publications, which examine dance in the early 20th century, focus on social dance and class; media and advertising; and the female body and dance. Her essays include "Parading the Past, Taming the New: From Ragtime to Rock and Roll" in Cultural Memory and Popular Dance (Palgrave, 2021); "Exotica and Ethereality: The Solo Art of Maud Allan" in On Stage Alone: Soloists and the Modern Dance Canon (University Press of Florida, 2014); and "All Is Not Right in the House of Atreus: Feminist Theatrical Renderings of The Oresteia" in Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works (McFarland, 2008). From 1999 to 2003, Professor Malnig served as editor of Dance Research Journal (DRJ), an international scholarly publication in dance studies, published by The Dance Studies Association, and she also served as the Editorial Board Chair of DRJ from 2003 to 2006. Professor Malnig was Chair of the Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program for several years. In 2013, she was awarded NYU's Distinguished Teaching Award.

Books

2023

Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock and Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s

Julie Malnig's Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock and Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s was published by Oxford University Press.

1995

Dancing Till Dawn

Julie Malnig's Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance was published by New York University Press.

Edited Volumes

2009

Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake

Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig, was published by University of Illinois Press.

Teaching and Research Interests

performance studies  dance and theatre history  theory  and criticism; social dance; early 20th-century American culture and the arts; feminist performance and criticism; performance art; critical writing 

Recent News

AWARDS AND HONORS

Professor Julie Malnig has received a 2018 fellowship from the Center for Ballet and the Arts, the international institute at NYU for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences in support of her book project Reality Show: American Teen Dance and the Cold War. As a part of her Fall 2018 fellowship at Center for Ballet and the Arts, Malnig presented "Rock and Roll, Race, and the Cold War," at CBA, New York University, October 22, 2018.   

Professor Malnig was interviewed by Authority Magazine, published by The Medium, about her new book Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s. 

PUBLICATIONS

Julie Malnig's new book Dancing Black, Dancing White: Rock 'n' Roll, Race and Youth Culture of the 1950s and Early 1960s has been released by Oxford University Press in May, 2023. 

Malnig contributed "Parading the Past, Taming the New: From Ragtime to  Rock and Roll," to Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget: Cultural Memory and Popular Dance, which is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2019.

Malnig's article "Just Kids: Youth, Community, and Race in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s" was published in the anthology Perspectives on American Dance: The Twentieth Century (University Press of Florida, 2018), edited by Sally Sommer, Trisha Henry Young, and Jen Atkins.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

Julie Malnig, along with Lise Friedman and Patricia Beaman, were invited to the NYU Gallatin symposium “The Alchemy and the Effort of Restaging Dance,” on September 24 and 25, 2020.

Malnig was invited as the keynote speaker at “Higher Ground: Mediating Popular Dance Histories,” for the Annual Performance of PoP (Performance of the Popular) Moves Conference in Toronto, Canada, on April 9, 2020.  

Along with Lise Friedman, Julie Malnig organized a screening of Friedman's film If the Dancer Dances, a film that follows the Stephen Petronio Dance Company's performance of Merce Cunningham's "Rain Forest", which was held at the Greenwich Village Quad Theatre in April 2019. The event included a panel discussion with the dancers and filmmakers and moderated by Malnig.

Malnig organized the lecture and will moderate discussion featuring noted scholar and dance dramaturg Nanako Nakajimo and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, "No(h) to Trio A: Dance Dramaturgy of Aging in a Performative Exhibition of Yvonne Rainer's Work," which was held at NYU Gallatin on January 28, 2019.

Malnig presented paper at Center for Ballet and the Arts seminar, "Rock n Roll Dance, Race, and the Cold War," on October 15, 2018.

Julie Malnig