Jens Richard Giersdorf is an Associate Professor of Dance at Marymount Manhattan College. His research focuses on the politics of choreographies of nationhood and locality in a global context as well as the disciplinary history of dance studies’ epistemology. He earned a Magister in Theatre, Dance, and Music Theatre Theory from the University of Leipzig, received his Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside, and taught in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey and Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His work has been translated and anthologized in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, and Germany and he has published in a number of journals including Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, GLQ – Gay & Lesbian Quarterly, Forum Modernes Theater, Jahrbuch für Tanzforschung, and Maska. His monograph The Body of the People: East German Dance since 1945 is the first study on dance in East Germany as a disciplinary and resistive tool. In co-authorship with Gay Morris, Giersdorf is currently editing an anthology on Choreographies of 21st Century Wars forthcoming in Oxford University Press.