Elise Morrison, Ph.D.

Elise Morrison's picture
Assistant Professor Theater and Performance Studies
Address: 
220 York St, New Haven, CT 06511-8925
(917) 699-5751

Elise Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Yale, where she teaches courses on Feminist Theater, Theater History, Digital Media in Performance, and Speech and Rhetoric, among others. She most recently enjoyed a position as Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University, with a specialization in Performance and Technology. Morrison received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University in 2011 and held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale from 2012-2015. She worked as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Theater Studies Program at Yale from 2015-16. Her book, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. In 2015 Morrison edited a special issue on “Surveillance Technologies in Performance” for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge, 11.2) and has published on this topic in IJPADM, Theater Magazine, and TDR. Her current research focuses on theatrical performances that stage technologies of contemporary warfare, from military drones to virtual reality interfaces used to train and rehabilitate soldiers, in order to investigate how live performance might intervene in the ethics and aesthetics of war fought “at a distance.” Also a performing artist, Elise has created numerous intermedia performances, including a solo show with surveillance cameras, Through the Looking Glass: A Surveillance Cabaret, an immersive cabaret about Lizzie Borden, Cabaret Murderess, and, in collaboration with Jamie Jewett, Luke Dubois, Thalia Field, and LostWax company dancers, an original dance-theater piece called Zoologic, performed through FirstWorks in Providence, RI in 2015.