Associate Professor of English
University of California, Davis

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My project uses theories of dance and movement to produce new readings of medieval literary traditions and to negotiate our own relationship to those traditions. Dance and movement practices, I argue, gave structure to memory practice within the Middle Ages. Through this claim, I offer an alternative to the dichotomy of oral and literate forms of communication currently dominating studies of medieval memory. Attending to movement’s relationship to memory within the medieval period also changes our understanding of how we ourselves remember the past. At once ephemeral and inclined to leave its traces in bodies and on worn spaces, the danced performance provides a suggestive figure for the medieval past as we encounter it in the present. This project examines the Breton lai’s uses of dance and movement across space; late-medieval English carols (once a danced form); danse macabre as a poetic and artistic tradition; and a nineteenth-century ballet implicated in that period’s construction of the medieval, a construction that continues to inform our own sense of the Middle Ages.

Seeta Chaganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. She teaches medieval European literature. Her first book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance, was published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan. Her current project is tentatively entitled The Past in Motion: Dance, Memory, and the Middle Ages. It examines medieval literary and artistic depictions of dance, arguing that dance and movement practices give form to memory practice both within and of the Middle Ages.

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