Lindsey Drury is a historian whose research addresses 'literary dances' and the history of dance's performative intermediation. As a Postdoc member of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in the Global Perspective, Drury works alongside her colleages in "RA5, Building Digital Communities" to bring a digital humanist perspective to the Cluster and draws from digital humanities methods to develop her Postdoctoral research project, "In the Mirror of ‘Pagan Dance’: North American indigenous dance and the quest for European origins". 

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 discourses on 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 literary sources in the early modern period: printed books of hours, the Renaissance erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and the medico-theological writing of Paracelsus. Prior to her PhD studies, Drury self-designed her curriculum for Liberal Studies MA in the subject of 'Body and Historicity' at the City University of New York and completed a thesis (2015) on the dance works of the Swiss-American choreographer Yvonne Meier. Drury continues to relate her scholarly pursuits in digital humanities, performance studies, dance history, and literary history to her artistic practice in new-media dance and performance.   

Selected Presentations

• "Beyond the Commons of God's Grace: European ideas of the 'pagan' as defined by her dance," Dance Studies Association Conference (Northwestern University, August 2019)
• “A Cosmic Dance of Miraculous Forgery: the St Vitus dance, imagination, and the sidereal body” European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (University of Amsterdam, July 2019)
• “Immersed in reading / reading as immersion” Bodies of Design Somaesthetics Conference (Florida Atlantic University, January 2019)
• “Paracelsus and the Veitstanz in Four Parts” Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel, January 2019) 
• “Amnesia of Acts: toward a history of physical practice.” Nordic Summer University (Fåro, August 2018)
• “Ennobling the Body at War: 16th and 17th century Anti-Dance Treatises on the Lineage of Phyrric Dance.” Dance Studies Association 2018 Conference, (University of Malta, July 2018)
• “Passing Time, Pastimes and Past Times: in Two Arrested Dances of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Tramutatione Metallica Sogni Tre” The Shape of Return Conference, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (Berlin, September 2017)
• “‘We Added Nothing of Our Own:’ the ethics of two women publishers in mid-16th century Paris” Othello’s Island 5th Annual Conference, (Valetta, Cyprus, April 2017)
• “What is Walking and How to Do It: Textual Estrangement and Experiential Anatomy in the Work of John Weaver.” Oxford Annual Dance Symposium (University of Oxford, April 2016)
• “Implicit and Mutually Implicated: Embodiment, Disability, and Dissent in the Works of Yvonne Meier.” York University Theatre & Performance Studies Symposium (Toronto, April 2014)

• In the Mirror of ‘Pagan Dance’: North American indigenous dance and the quest for European origins.
  Research project for Temporal Communities RA 5: Building Digital Communities.

• Three Imagined Dances: the somatics of early modern textual mediation
  PhD Dissertation (2019), Text and Event in Early Modern Europe Erasmus Mundus PhD program.