About

A choreographer and practitioner, Phoebe Rumsey earned her PhD in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, at The City University of New York (CUNY) in February 2019. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, an MA in Theatre from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a BA in Dance from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has presented papers at IFTR, ATHE, ASTR, PSi, CATR, and MATC. Her monograph, “Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and the Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre,” (Routledge, 2023) explores how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the body as a site of embodied history and cultural memory. She recently published Dance in Musical Theatre: A History of the Body in Movement (Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2023) an edited collection with Dustyn Martincich. Other publications included a chapter in Reframing The Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity (Palgrave). “Preserved by Permafrost: Reanimating and Reimagining Complexity in Canada’s Klondike Gold Rush“ a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. She has an upcoming chapter in The Routledge Companion to the Post-1970’s American Stage Musical that focuses on collaborative strategies in regards to the mixing of musical genres and movement styles to embolden diversity on stage in the musical Hamilton. For the past four years she has been a Senior Lecturer in Musical Theatre and Drama and Performance at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. In the last year she took on the role of Course Leader. Prior to moving to the UK, she taught Theatre History and Body Movement for Actors at the City College of New York.