The University will offer a Ph.D. program in Theater and Performance Studies beginning in August.

Professor David Levin, who founded the undergraduate Theater and Performance Studies major almost 20 years ago, has been named the chair of the new Ph.D. program. Levin is currently the Addie Clark Harding Professor in Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Theater and Performance Studies, and the College and serves as chair of the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies.

“[Theater and Performance Studies] as a field, as with many comparatively young fields, has been a bit insular,” Levin stated in a University News Office article. “It struck us that the kind of [Theater and Performance Studies] we’re interested in at the University of Chicago is irreverent when it comes to disciplinary boundaries.”

The new doctoral program aims to offer an interdisciplinary education spanning the humanities. University Ph.D. candidates in other disciplines were given the chance to become a part of the new Theater and Performance Studies program as joint students this past academic year.

The program will expose students to multiple fields of study in response to an increased demand by higher learning institutions for faculty members whose expertise is not confined to a single discipline.

New faculty for the doctoral program will include contemporary performance artist Annie Dorsen and former curator of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Leslie Buxbaum Danzig, whose work has focused on dance-theater as well as devised physical theater.