A List
7/23/07

FUOSS APPOINTED TO MAURER PROFESSORSHIP AT SLU

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of Performance and Communication Arts Kirk W. Fuoss has been appointed to the Maurer Professorship of Speech and Rhetoric, recently established by a gift from the Maurer Family Foundation.

A member of the St. Lawrence faculty since 1989, Fuoss is a graduate of Baylor University, with a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University.

Fuoss has won a number of awards for his scholarship, much of which has focused on lynchings as a form of performance. His 1997 book Striking Performances is considered to be ground-breaking in terms of the politics of performance, performance historiography and performance in everyday life. Fuoss gave the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecture on campus in 2000 on "Display Matters: Lynching and Performance," and a number of his essays on the topic have also been published.

In addition, he's the co-author of an essay titled "Spectacular Imaginings: Performing Community in Guatemala," published in the 2001 book Global Multiculturalism: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race, and Nation.

Fuoss has directed a number of campus productions, including The Long Christmas Ride Home, which involved actors and life-sized puppets; the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Wit; an adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in 2004, the staging for which included a 15-by-25-foot pool of water; and an adaptation of Scott Campbell's novel Touched, which Fuoss wrote as well as directed.

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More information: Arts at St. Lawrence