Katherine Zien

I am a scholar of theatre and performance studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. My work spans the Western Hemisphere in considering intersections of politics, historiography, and performance in the making and unmaking of social and political movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have authored and edited recent and forthcoming books on sovereignty and performance in Panama and the Canal Zone; the cultural Cold War and the Global South; and performance, gender and sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean. I am currently completing a monograph tentatively titled “Theater of War: Performance, Military Training, and Counterinsurgency in Panama, 1960-1990.” This book examines performance repertoires of military training – theorizing instances of rehearsal, simulation, scripting, and improvisation – in the history of inter-American military alliances that took place in the former Canal Zone. For this project I am also creating an interactive, multimedia website that will accompany the book and provide maps of former US military bases in Panama created with ArcGIS software. This research is supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).