About Tara
Chicago, IL
Tara Zahra is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Her work has focused on the history of Modern Europe, migration, globalization, nationalism, and the family. Most recently, she is the author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023); and, with Pieter Judson, The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford, 2025). She has been the recipient of a Macarthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Zahra’s current project, in collaboration with Meredith Dincolo, explores the intersections of dance and history through research, writing, teaching, and movement.
Dance as History
Dance as History is a collaborative project (with Meredith Dincolo) that probes the relationship between dance and history, with the goal of producing new ideas, creative, and scholarly work in the form of movement, writing, and pedagogy. Zahra and Dincolo are particularly interested in how dance embodies the methodological and creative challenges of producing history, including issues of memory; selective and unreliable sources and archives; and competing perspectives and narratives. In the studio, seminars, and writing, we pose questions about how movement has embodied individual, family, and collective histories in the 20th and 21st centuries.