Victoria Thoms

Before doctoral study in the United Kingdom, Thoms trained in ballet, contemporary dance and choreography in Canada as part of her Undergraduate and Master’s Degree. She is author of Martha Graham: Gender and the haunting of a dance pioneer (2013). Her new research projects work with  literary theory and trauma studies to understand how theatre dance in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century was a form of bearing witness to the era's upheaval and violence. She has published in Dance Research Journal, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Research in Dance Education, Women: a Cultural Review, Modernism/Modernity Print+, and Dance Chronicle. She was Chair of the Society for Dance Research in the UK from 2011 to 2018. Thoms is presently co-editor of the interdiciplinary book series Dance in Dialogue published with Bloomsbury.

My research foregrounds the importance of theatre dance as a political, social and embodied force.  I use an interdisciplinary approach  that brings together feminist theory, deconstruction and psychoanalysis with a  commitment to reading the moving body across different medial, geographic and historical matrices. This is essential for understanding theatre dance's complexity and wide-reaching impact.