Associate Professor Harmony Bench’s research revolves around encounters between bodies and machine or media technologies. She particularly attends to how human bodies and technological devices are imagined in relation to each other, and how technologies facilitate the circulation and transmission of movements, gestures, and even bodily schema. From 2014-2019, she was co-editor of The International Journal of Screendance with Simon Ellis. Her writing has appeared in numerous edited collections, including The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, Routledge Dance Studies Reader (3rd ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Choreographies of 21st Century War and Dance on Its Own Terms, as well as Theatre Journal, Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations, and Performance Matters, among others. Current projects include an open-access book with University of Minnesota Press, Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common, as well as a suite of digital humanities projects that can be found at http://movementonthemove.osu.edu/. She is also pursuing a collaborative research project with Kate Elswit, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which brings data visualization and computational tools of analysis to bear on dance history in the study of mid-century African American choreographer Katherine Dunham. More information on Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry can be found at https://dunhamsdata.org/. Dr. Bench is affiliated faculty with Theatre, Folklore, Translational Data Analytics, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
