Cavanaugh Reading Series Features Professional Dancer, Scholar Mark Broomfield

Noted scholar and professional dancer Dr. Mark Broomfield will discuss intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and dance during the annual Cavanaugh Reading Series at St. John Fisher University.

The lecture will be held at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 12, in the Black Box Theater at the Arts Center at Murphy Hall. 

Broomfield, associate professor of English and the founder and director of Performance as Social Change at SUNY Geneseo, will deliver his talk, “Black Queer Dance: Gay Men and the Politics of Passing for Almost Straight.”

A London-born award-winning scholar and artist of Jamaican heritage, Broomfield has published in the areas of race, gender, sexuality, dance, and ethnography. He has performed nationally and internationally and danced with the repertory company Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, performing in leading works by some of the most diverse and recognized African American choreographers in the American modern dance tradition.

The lecture includes a question-and-answer panel discussion featuring Carlos R. A. Jones, chair of dance at SUNY Brockport.

The annual reading series was named in honor of the English Department’s friend and former colleague, Fr. John R. Cavanaugh. At the time of his passing in 2007, Fr. Cavanaugh had been associated with Fisher for more than 50 years, including more than 30 as one of the stalwarts of the English Department. He retired from active teaching in 1994, but never from his service to the institution. Devoted to English Renaissance literature and Irish studies of all kinds, along with good conversation, he was generous with his time and had a good sense of humor. Fr. Cavanaugh was known as an “exacting and encouraging teacher whom students admired and remembered.”

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the English Department and School of Arts and Sciences.