Lindsey Drury is an historian whose research addresses early modern performance philosophies and theories of embodiment, 'literary dances' and the history of dance's performative intermediation, as well as the colonial history of dance. She is presently a postdoc within the Critical Dance Studies programme at Freie Universität Berlin. As a member of "RA5, Building Digital Communities" within the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in the Global Perspective, Drury most recently co-edited a special issue of Interface Critique with Dr. Nina Tolksdorf, forthcoming in 2025. 

Drury completed her doctorate (2019) in Early Modern Studies as a part of the consortium Erasmus Mundus PhD program Text and Event in Early Modern Europe at the Freie Universität-Berlin and the University of Kent at Canterbury. As a doctoral student, Drury researched what literary expressions of dance contributed to wider early modern philosophies of embodiment.  Her PhD dissertation, "Three Imagined Dances: the somatics of early modern textual mediation" thus explored the interrelated expressions of dance that emerged from otherwise vastly different source materials in the early modern period: printed books of hours, the Renaissance erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the medico-theological writing of Paracelsus. 

Research Interests

• New materialisms, early modern philosophies of embodiment, Lucretianism and Epicuranism, feminist philosophy
• New methodologies in the history and philosophy of physical practice
• Technique & technology, dance/embodied performance and remediation
• Entangled religious/political histories (Reformation & colonialism) of dance & embodied performance
• Indigenous epistemologies, practice-based and artistic research 
• early modernism, temporality, performance studies in deep-time
• Colonial imaginaries, (mis)representations of Indigneous performance practices in the colonial mediascape
• Data feminism, data sovereignty, data-based people's histories

EXC 2020 Project

In the Mirror of "Pagan Dance": North American Indigenous Dance and the Quest for European Origins (2019-2023)

Book Projects 

Forthcoming 2025. Cosmic Body Dancing Plague: Performance and cosmology in the work of Paracelsus. Under contract, Brill Aries book series. 

Forthcoming 2026. Dances for the Potter’s Wheel: Body, time, and world in early print (working title). Under review.

Forthcoming est. 2028. Fragments for a Natural History of Dance (working title). In progress. 

Co-Edited Special Issue Projects

Forthcoming June 2025. Conversing the Book. Vol. 5 of Interface Critique, guest editor with Nina Tolksdorf (print as well as digital Open Access). Contributions by Johanna Drucker, Alexander Galloway, Roberto Simanowski, Jennifer Gomez Menjívar, Beatrice Gründler, Marian Dörk, and others. (Heidelberg: Arthistoricum Verlag)

2017. Matters of Act: A Journal of Ideas, co-editor with Japan/New York-based performance group No Collective. Print on demand and Open Access (Brooklyn: Already Not Yet Press). 

Book Chapters

Forthcoming 2025. “Pellicle and Portrait: Face, race, and interface in media theory (from Lavater to Dagognet to Galloway)” Vol. 5 of Interface Critique (Heidelberg: Arthistoricum Verlag).

Forthcoming 2025. “Cannibal Choreographies: Anthropology, anthropophagy, and modernist dance in the Americas” (Un-)Sichtbarkeiten – Moderner Tanz Re-Visited, Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung Jahrbuch (transcript Verlag) 

Forthcoming 2025. “Imitation de la foi: Matérialité, imagination et croyance dans l'écriture tardive de Paracelse sur la danse de St Vitus” Le Corps et les Pouvoirs de l'Imagination, Elizabeth Claire, Beatrice Delaurenti, Roberto Poma, and Koen Vermeir, eds. (Turnhout: Brepols). Accepted book chapter - Peer Reviewed -

December 2024. “Memory, Ceremony, Sacrifice: Gene Weltfish, the Pawnee Nation, and the Settler State” in Marginality and ‘Resistencia’: Narratives of Alterity, Dissent, and Belonging in the Spanish-speaking World and Beyond, edited by Martina L. Weisz and Miguel Rivas Venegas (Berlin: De Gruyter)

2021. “When is a House? In Seven Figures”

Institution is a Verb: A Panoply Performance Lab Compilation, Esther Neff, Ayana Evans, Tsedaye Makonnen, Elizabeth Lamb, eds. (New York: The Operating System) 

2014. “Ellen C. Covito’s Performer Pedagogy.”
Ellen C. Covito: Works After Weather, No Collective, eds. (New York: Already Not Yet Press)

Journal Articles

Forthcoming Fall 2025. “Traveling into the Dark: A Reflection on Travel Accounts, Settler Reception, and the “Remote” Arts of the Far North”, special issue on Artistic Imagination and Social Imaginaries–Polysemous Readings of Historical Travelling Accounts edited by Laura Hellsten and Eduardo Abrandes, MDPI Arts Journal. -Peer Reviewed - 

August 2023. “The Transhistorical, Transcultural Life of Sausages: From medieval morescas to New Mexican Matachines with Aby Warburg”. Postmedieval, special issue “Legacies of Medieval Dance” guest edited by Kathryn Dickason. -Peer Reviewed-

April 2022 “What’s in a Name? Somatics and the Historical Revisionism of Thomas Hanna” Dance Research Journal. -Peer reviewed-

March 2022. “The Blurred Bodies of Matachines: Warburg's Notes on a Colonial New Mexican Dance Drama” In Lightning Symbol and Snake Dance: Aby Warburg and Pueblo Art, Uwe Fleckner and Christine Chavez, eds. (Berlin: Hatje Cantz). 

September 2021. “The Double-Life of ‘Pagan Dance’: Indigenous Rituality, Early Modern Dance and the Language of US Newspapers” European Journal of Theatre and Performance, No. 03. Essays Section, "Language and Performance: Moving across Discourses and Practices in a Globalised World", Małgorzata Sugiera, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, and Timmy De Laet, eds. -Peer reviewed-

2014. “Mobilizing the Ineffable: Yvonne Meier” Learning to Love Dance More: A Performance Journal. Volume 8, Displacement (Summer 2014), 8-12. 

2012. “Interview with Yvonne Meier” Learning to Love Dance More: A Performance Journal. Volume 5, Back to School (Fall 2012).

2011. “Emergence: Watching and being early-career artists in New York City dance” Critical Correspondence, Movement Research (NYC).

Selected Academic Presentations

“Other ‘Others’: Outsiders and Ancestors from Basque Carnival to New Mexican Matachines”      
June 2025, curated panel of the Performance and Migration working group, International Federation for Theater Research (IFTR), Cologne, Germany. 

“Toward a Colonial History of Dance: From Le Pays Basque to Indigenous North America”        
May 2025, invited talk for panel series Images of Dancing Women in the Middle Ages sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA) at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo). 

“Misunderstanding Matachines: A Comparative History of Colonial Dance Drama and Performance Theory”
December 2025, Performance Studies International annual conference, Fortaleza, Brazil.

“Imitation of Faith: Magic and science in Paracelsus’s late writing on St Vitus Dance” 
October 2024, Symposium, “Between Science and Magic”, Turku 

“Cannibal Choreographies: Dance primitivism, art history, and modernist anthropology”
July 2024, Jahrestagung, Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung, Essen.

“Settler / Indigenous Dance Modernisms: Some problems and an approach”         
July 2024, Dance Studies Association Annual Conference, Buenos Aires. By invitation from Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht to the panel series “Remapping Dance Modernisms”

“Modern Dance Ancestry and Colonial Reckoning in the work of Keith Hennessy”
November 2023, American Society for Aesthetics Annual Meeting, Arlington, Virginia. Funded by an Irene H. Chayes Travel Grant.

“Bodies of Empire, Bodies of Others: Dance in Medieval Asia, through the Lens of the Period’s European Authors” November 2023, Invited speaker, “Transforming a Medieval Saga Into a Contemporary Ballad and Dance Performance” organized by Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit. 

“Response to Evelyn Schuler-Zea’s ‘Knots, Stones and Living with the Dead’”
July 2023, Invited short response presentation for the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities” Annual Conference: “Constant Change: The Temporal Dimensions of Materialities in the Arts” Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Germany.

“A Dancing Bear: Plastic Shamanism and Settler Modern Dance ‘Ancestry’”
October 2022, Invited presenter to INSPIRED hub curated by Alexander Schwan,“Dancing Resilience” Dance Studies Association Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada.

“Dancing Bodies between Political Activism and Indigenous Survivance”
September 2022, Invited participant in panel “Analyzing Activist Bodies” curated by Alexander Schwan and Nina Tolksdorf,“Matters of Urgency” Congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft, Berlin.

“Captive Material Histories of Indigenous Dance: Ethnological Museums, Repatriation Efforts, and the field of Dance Studies”
August 2022, Dancing with Decolonization international conference. Online. 

“It’s not a Tacit Decolonial. Artistic Research, practice-based knowledges, and European research”
July 2022, at the Nordic Summer University. Study Circle 7: Experiencing Artistic Research through the Senses, Oslo.

“Texturing Space – Towards an Exponential Cartography”
May 2022,  Panel with Christoph Brunner (Leuphana University Luneburg), Knut Ebeling (weißensee – kunsthochschule berlin), and Marius Förster (Designer), MissRead book fair, Berlin . 

“Neither Field nor Forensic, neither property nor sovereignty”
November 2021, Introduction of the workshop Depth of Field: Decolonization and the Grounds of Art(istic) Research, hosted by EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin.

“‘We’re not Pagan’:  Indigenous Discourses on Dance and Religion in US newspapers around the turn of the turn of the 20th century”
October 2021, As a part of a panel series organized with Alexander Schwann and Kathryn Dickason titled Radical Religion for the Dance Studies Association Conference, Rutgers University.

“What is the Digital Doing?”, November 2020
Introductory session for the What is the Digital Doing? workshop organized with Nina Tolksdorf

“Vulnerability for Open Science”, May 2020    
Freie Universität Open Science Working Group, “Digital Humanities and Open Science”

“A Cosmic Dance of Miraculous Forgery: the St Vitus dance, imagination, and the sidereal body”,   July 2019
European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, Amsterdam                    

“Immersed in reading / reading as immersion” , January 2019
Bodies of Design Somaesthetics Conference, Florida    

“Paracelsus and the Veitstanz in Four Parts”, January 2019
Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel        

“Amnesia of Acts: toward a history of physical practice”, August 2018
Nordic Summer University, Fårö.      

“Ennobling the Body at War: Anti-Dance Treatises on the Lineage of Phyrric Dance“, July 2018
Dance Studies Association 2018 Conference, Malta.                                
“Passing Time, Pastimes and Past Times: in Two Arrested Dances of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Tramutatione Metallica Sogni Tre”
September 2017, Shape of Return conference, the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin            

"We Added Nothing of Our Own:’ the ethics of two women publishers in mid-16th century Paris”
April 2017, Othello’s Island 5th Annual Conference       

“What is Walking and How to Do It:  Textual Estrangement and Experiential Anatomy in the Work of John Weaver“, April 2016, Oxford Annual Dance Symposium      

“Disease Knows No Borders: St. Vitus Dance and the Ambiguity of Infection”
March 2016, Early English Drama & Performance network symposium    

“Implicit and Mutually Implicated: Embodiment, Disability, and Dissent in the Works of Yvonne Meier”
April 2014, York University Theatre & Performance Studies Symposium