Penelope Hanstein is professor and director for dance at Texas Woman’s University and for several summers has been a visiting professor at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. She has written many articles on the nature of art making in dance and choreography theory, was named the 1995 National Dance Association Scholar, and is a past president of the Congress on Research in Dance.
In Researching Dance, an introduction to research methods in dance addressed primarily to graduate students, the editors explore dance as evolutional, defining it in view of its intrinsic participatory values, its developmental aspects, and its purposes from art to ritual, and they examine the role of theory in research. The editors have also included essays by nine dancer-scholars who examine qualitative and quantitative inquiry and delineate the most common approaches for investigating dance, raising concerns about philosophy and aesthetics, historical scholarship, movement analysis, sexual and gender identification, cultural diversity, and the resources available to students. The writers have included study questions, research exercises, and suggested readings to facilitate the book’s use as a classroom text.