Research Interests

Jessica Ray Herzogenrath researches U.S. cultural history, in particular popular performances, drawing on her experience performing, choreographing, and teaching dance. She explores how embodied practices simultaneously reveal long-established cultural traditions and hold the potential for immediate change. Her manuscript-in-progress — Modern Folk: Dancing American in the Midwest Metropolis, 1890-1940 — examines how women deployed folk dance in the process of Americanization in Progressive-era Chicago. In 2019, she delved into the archives of dance writer Ann Barzel as the 2018-2019 John S. Aubrey Fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago). She also writes for Dance Source Houston and serves as the (founding) board president of the Houston-based dance company Social Movement Contemporary Dance.