2010–11 International Fellow Claudia Brazzale parlayed her dream of being a dancer into a transformative and interdisciplinary career. She is an accomplished dancer, having studied at the London Contemporary Dance School and Merce Cunningham Studio, with an extensive list of productions and choreographies. Brazzale has a multifaceted interest in anthropology and various fields of humanities that developed out of her love of dance.
Brazzale’s experience in academia has been discouraging, auspicious, and inspiring. The provincial culture of the small town in northern Italy where she grew up often made her feel as though the study of dance was coded as feminine and thus deemed a less important field. Subsequently, Brazzale focused her academic attention on women and gender, and much of her work was greatly influenced by her own experiences. Her dissertation offered an interdisciplinary look at family firms, the economic boom of northeastern Italy, and its effect on entrepreneurial culture. Her studies discuss cosmopolitan advertisements, the patriarchal structure of business, and the role of women in northeastern regional economic development. Her exposure to unfair gender dynamics grew out of her experiences in her own family business. Today, Brazzale is developing her dissertation into a manuscript that is truly auto-ethnographic work.
Despite her concerns, Brazzale’s academic studies did not remain detached from dance. Her reconnection developed out of an invitation to lecture at Princeton University. The linkage between women’s studies and dance allowed her to bridge the fields into a “performative” lecture, which she presented at Rutgers University. Her articles “Falling into the Spectacle: Berlusconi’s Performance of Modernity and Gender” and “Dancing through Otherness: The Circulation of West African Dance in Italy” are both expected to be published this year. Brazzale also has several creative works on the horizon, ranging from a documentary about her research on the economy of West African dance in Italy to dance performances at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library at Rutgers University.
Brazzale credits the AAUW fellowship for allowing her the freedom to be creative and explore her background this past year. Before receiving the award, she faced stress in the extremely hierarchical Italian academic job market. The culture of the system fails to integrate scholars, let alone women scholars, whose prestige from American universities is unknown in Italian academia. Brazzale’s battle with gender discrimination in Italy is one that nearly prevented the creative incorporation of dance into her studies. Her “protective wing” of the fellowship legitimized her work in the field of women studies. She combated societal pressure of what was deemed a valuable and worthwhile education. She adapted her dream of being a dancer into a career that enabled her to embrace interdisciplinary studies that thread through gender, dance, and anthropology.
This post was written by AAUW Fellowships and Grants Intern Elyssa Shildneck.
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