Cara Tovey

Cara Tovey is a Lecturer in German in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. Prior to coming to UCLA she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German and Russian Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. She completed her Ph.D. in German Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Film and Media Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research interests include the intersection of early cinema and German literature with performance studies in the early 20th century. Her research focuses on questions of the body and performance, critical disability studies, environmentalism, and social movements. Her secondary research interests include 20^th century Austria, in particular Red Vienna, as well as contemporary, transnational cinema. She is currently working on her first book project, Life as a Dance: Performing Lebensreform and Modern Dance at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, which examines the connection between the development of modern dance and the life reform movement in Germanophone Europe. In addition to this book, she is also presently engaged in a research project examining Sir Ludwig Guttmann and the founding of the Stoke Mandeville Games, particularly questions of visibility and intersectionality with regards to disability identity and the Paralympic movement. Her publications include the chapter “Nature” in Red Vienna Sourcebook, November 2020, winner of the American Library Association’s “Best Historical Materials” award, “The Language of Dance, the Dancer’s Eye, and Aesthetic Experience in Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz II” in Seminar, May 2022, and a forthcoming article “Performing Deaf Identity and Deaf Gain in Michael Arden’s 2015 Spring Awakening,” scheduled to appear in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in early 2023.