"I can hardly express what an honor it is to have been selected to deliver the Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture in Dance Studies. Selma Jeanne Cohen was a pioneer in the field of dance scholarship, and her adventurousness and perseverance as a proponent of the serious consideration of dance have been an inspiration to me and many others. Her passing last year, along with that of another great Fulbright alumna and dance personality, Katherine Dunham, make this a particularly important moment for us to take stock of the contributions of these remarkable women, and of the significance of the Fulbright Foundation in making their research possible." - Barbara Browning   

Barbara Browning is the author of Samba: Resistance in Motion (1995, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for an outstanding publication in the field of dance studies) and Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (1998), as well as numerous articles in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, TDR, Women & Performance, and other publications. She studied, taught and performed Brazilian dance in Brazil, the US and Europe for many years. She is also a writer of fiction and poetry. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 1989. After teaching for six years in the Department of English at Princeton University (1989-97), Browning joined the faculty of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, where she served for several years as Chair. She is currently Associate Professor at NYU, specializing in dance ethnography and the performance culture of the African diaspora. She is a member of the governing boards of the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars. She held a Fulbright Fellowship in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil from 1983-4, and her experiences studying dance during that time served as the basis for her first book.