Helena Hammond to Give 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture at 33rd Annual Fulbright Association Conference

Washington, DC (October 26, 2010)-- The Fulbright Association announced today that Helena Hammond (USA 1990), lecturer in dance history at the University of Surrey, will present the 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen Lecture in International Dance Scholarship on Friday, Nov. 5 at the NH City and Tower Hotel, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Dr. Hammond received her bachelor’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London and her master’s degree from Yale University, where she was supported by the Fulbright program. As a cultural historian, she gained her doctorate from the University of Oxford for her dissertation on royal imagery and political power in the eighteenth-century Italian South. Dr. Hammond is currently completing, Bodies of History: Ballet, Politics and the Historical Imagination, for which she received support from the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University (2007). Dr. Hammond’s 2010 Selma Jeanne Cohen lecture is entitled, "Bodies of History: The Ballets Russes, International Cultural Exchange and the Historical Imagination.”

"My lecture discusses some of the strategies through which ballet can bring powerful visions of the historical past to the theatre stage. Approaching dance as a dynamic branch of cultural exchange and international history, my lecture draws on key figures highly involved with, or close to, the Ballets Russes, such as Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Proust, Léon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois. Through scrutiny of their work, it uncovers how the francophone orientation of the Ballets Russes brought the company into contact with innovative French attitudes to staging the past that were so crucial for its own history ballets, ballets which were to have a profound influence on the future direction of dance in Europe and the Americas.”

The Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund for International Scholarship on Dance honors the pioneering and seminal contributions of preeminent dance historian Selma Jeanne Cohen. The Fulbright Association created the fund with a generous gift from Dr. Cohen in 2000 to recognize the importance of her Fulbright exchange experience in Russia and to perpetuate her interests in dance as an international enterprise.

"I am delighted to have been selected for the Selma Jeanne Cohen Fund lectureship. It is an honor to deliver this lecture dedicated to Dr. Cohen’s name and to her pioneering work in building the field of dance history as a vibrant academic discipline,” says Dr. Hammond. "I’d like to think there is a certain empathy between Dr. Cohen’s nomination (in her seminal anthology Dance as Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present) of Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra as the Ballets Russes works having the most visual impact on audiences, and my own lecture’s focus on these ballets and their designs in bringing rich visions of history to the dance stage.”

Previous lecturers are Leslie Friedman, the Lively Foundation, San Francisco (2000); Robin Marshall Grove, University of Melbourne, Australia (2001); Gretchen Ward Warren, University of South Florida (2002); Wayne B. Kraft, Eastern Washington University and the Erd?ly (Dance) Ensemble (2003); London-based Millicent Hodson, dance historian and choreographer (2004); Richard Semmens, University of Western Ontario, Canada (2005); Barbara Browning, New York University (2006), Ron Jenkins, Wesleyan University (2007); Alison M. Friedman, general manager, Parnassus Productions, Inc., Beijing (2008); and Laurel Victoria Gray, artistic director, Silk Dance Road Company (2009).

The Fulbright Association is a private, non-profit organization that supports and promotes the Fulbright Program, an international educational and cultural exchange initiative created in 1946 by legislation sponsored by the late Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. There are now more than 275,000 Fulbright alumni worldwide.