Rebecca Schneider

Rebecca Schneider was born into a family who was historically involved in the Atlantic slave trade and eventually moved westward into present-day Missouri, Kansas, and California.^[2] Her parents are authors Paul Schneider and Pat Schneider, and her siblings are authors Bethany Schneider, Laurel C. Schneider, and Paul Schneider.^[3] She obtained her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University in 1996; her doctoral dissertation was titled The Explicit Body in Performance.^[4]

After working as a lecturer at Yale University (1992-1995) and as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College (1995-1997), Schneider became an assistant professor at Cornell University in 1997.^[4] She moved to Brown University in 2002, and she was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and to full professor in 2009.^[4] She was chair of Brown's Department of Theatre and Performance Studies from 2007 until 2013.^[4]

Schneider specializes in performance studies.^[1] She wrote three books on performance studies: The Explicit Body in Performance (1997),^[5] Performing Remains (2011),^[6] and Theatre and History (2014).^[7] In 2018, she co-authored Remain with Ioana Jucan and Jussi Parikka.^[8] She was an editor for three TDR special issues, namely in 2012, 2015, and 2018.^[1]

Schneider won the American Society for Theatre Research's 2019 Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize for her 2018 Theatre Journal article "That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up".^[9] In 2021, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies,^[10] to work on a book discussing "how performance is linked to the currents of oceanic history".^[2]

• The Explicit Body in Performance (1997)^[11][12]
• Performing Remains (2011)^[13][14]
• Theatre and History (2014)^[15][16]
• Remain (2018; with Ioana Jucan and Jussi Parikka)^[17]