Individual Listing

0103 ARTS
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Tomko, Linda J

Associate Professor of Dance

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Dance


Biography

Linda J. Tomko is a historian, performer, and re-embodier of dances past. She holds a Ph.D. in History from UCLA, and she focuses her research in two areas. In the first of these, she explores issues of gender and dance in the early twentieth-century United States. Indiana University Press published her book in this area in 1999 -- Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920. Tomko's second research focus is the re-embodiment and theorization of early eighteenth-century French and English court and theatre dances. This proceeds in tandem with her work as a performer and historian. Tomko leads the Baroque dance troupe "Les Menus Plaisirs," which has appeared in concert at Indiana University's Early Music Institute, at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and in connection with the Berkeley Festival in San Francisco. As well, Tomko has performed as a soloist in Japan and the United States. In 1998, she choreographed period-style dances for the Stanford University Music Department's fully staged production of Dido and Aeneas, a late 17th-century English "opera." In June 2005 she performed as a dancer in the Boston Early Music Festival’s premiere of Johann Mattheson’s early 18 th-century opera Boris Goudenow, presented in Boston and also at Tanglewood. With Wendy Hilton, for a number of years, she co-directed the annual Stanford University Summer Workshop in Baroque Dance and its Music. In 2005 she relocated the summer Workshop to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Professor Tomko is active in scholarly dance organizations. She was President of the Society of Dance History Scholars from 1998 to 2001, and is former Reviews Editor of Dance Research Journal, the publication of the Congress on Research in Dance. She is presently editor for the Dance & Music series published by Pendragon Press. Her article “Fete Accompli: Gender, ‘Folk-Dance,’ and Progressive-era Political Ideals in New York City,” published in Corporealities (Routledge, 1996), won the 1996 Gertrude Lippincott Prize awarded by SDHS for the best English-language article in dance history and theory.  

Degrees

Ph.D History 1991

University of California, Los Angeles

MA Dance 1980

University of California, Los Angeles

BA International Studies 1975

Miami University

Awards

Award for Academic Distinction at the Master's Level in the College of Fine Arts, 1980, from UCLA Alumni Association Phi Beta Kappa Mortar Board
NEH Fellow to Ninth Aston Magna Academy on Music, the Arts & Society. Rutgers, State University of New York. June 16 - July 1, 1989
Fellow to University of California Humanities Research Institute, "Choreographing History" residence research group, Susan Foster, convener, January - June 1993
1996 Gertrude Lippincott Prize for the best English-language article in dance history or theory, awarded by Society of Dance History Scholars.
Fellow to UCR Center for Ideas and Society Residential Research Group, "Sexuality and Gender in the Eighteenth Century," Spring 1996.
NEH Fellow to Thirteenth Aston Magna Academy on Music, the Other Arts & Society. Yale University. June 15 - July 6, 1997.
Fellow to Center for Ideas and Society, University of California, Riverside, Spring 2001.


Publications

Invited Encyclopedia Article


"Beyond Notation," part 3 (vol 5: 325-330) in a tri-partite entry on "Dance Reconstruction" for International Encyclopedia of Dance , Selma Jeanne Cohen, editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. "Dance" entry for The Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter Williams. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. Volume 3, "The Arts," pp. 621-631.

"Dance Classes" entry in Girlhood in America, An Encyclopedia , ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2001. Volume 1, A-I, pp. 165-174.



Scholary Book (technical)


Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.



Refereed Edited Book Article (technical)


"Fete Accompli: Gender, 'Folk-Dance', and Progressive-era Political Ideals in New York City," in Corporealities , Susan L. Foster, editor, Routledge Press, London, England, and New York, New York, 1996, pp. 155-176.

"Considering Causation and Condition of Possibility," in Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, ed. Alexandra Carter. London, U.K.: Routledge, 2004, pp. 80-93.