Books by Christopher Swift
Performing Empire: Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville, 2023
From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus o... more From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity.
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
Articles and Book Chapters by Christopher Swift
ArcGIS Story Map: https://arcg.is/1KHqCP, 2021
The City Performs: An Architectural History of NYC Theaters contains the city block locations, re... more The City Performs: An Architectural History of NYC Theaters contains the city block locations, resource links, and brief summaries for over 400 historical and contemporary performance spaces in the five boroughs of NYC, from the colonial period to the present. Data is georeferenced for spatial and chronological analyses.
Curation and design by Christopher Swift. Research by Christopher Swift, Diego Atauchi, Solangie Falla Crespo and Freddy Ruiz. Support provided by the National Endowment of the Humanities (A Cultural History of Digital Technology) and the City Tech Emerging Undergraduate Scholars grant.
The City Performs: An Architectural History of New York City Theaters by Christopher Swift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Email cswift@citytech.cuny.edu with suggestions for amendments and additions.
A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury), 2020
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Virtual Place-Based Learning, 2019
Open-source Global Information Systems (GIS) software serves as a common mechanism for students t... more Open-source Global Information Systems (GIS) software serves as a common mechanism for students to situate theatrical productions in the context of the built urban environment, deepening their understanding of the social, economic, and artistic forces that contributed to performance culture. Mapping is a shared pedagogy for analyzing and presenting research findings from different fields. Learning how to collect, analyze, and map data is also a general education skill that can be applied to disciplines across undergraduate curricula.
TDR: The Drama Review, 2017
Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural , 2015
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulato... more In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny humanlike object that resides in the space between what is essentially human and what is essentially not human), the physical animation of late medieval devotional objects fulfilled the expectations of their puppeteers and audiences to move. Glittering precious metals and stones, liturgical music, and other environmental properties of the sanctuary materially inferred the presence and action of saints on earth, greatly enhancing the affective lives of devotees. I focus on later medieval Spanish statues of the Virgin in order to transcend their familiar aesthetic and religious interpretations of anthropomorphic statues, and explore instead their functional aspects and performative relationships between ritual objects and their users.
Oxford Bibliographies Online: Medieval Studies, edited by Paul E. Szarmach (OUP), 2015
Medieval Iberian theater and performance maintains a peculiar status within, and between, perform... more Medieval Iberian theater and performance maintains a peculiar status within, and between, performance and medieval disciplines. In theater studies, medieval Iberia has received minimal scholarly attention, and standard theater history textbooks contain only traces of Iberian material, if any at all. Despite the existence of Catalonian and Castilian archival materials that indicate performance traditions unique to the peninsula, scholars of Spanish literature (outside of the notable exceptions below) generally view Iberian medieval theater as an anomaly. One of the main reasons for this situation is that Iberian theater has yet to emerge fully from traditional historiographic parameters predicated upon the narratives and liturgical forms of the Christian Church. The dearth of liturgical performance evidence in Castile—whether due to the dominance of the Mozarabic rite on the peninsula through the 11th century, Muslim occupation, Iberia’s unique religious and cultural history, or the destruction of church documents—should not preclude future research into Spanish medieval theater. The broader field of medieval European theater has moved forward to embrace a wider range of public acts, including jongleur performance, mock battles, performative reading and viewing, devotional practices, festivals, tableaux, court entertainments, and processions, and new approaches and forms of performance are just beginning to take hold in Spanish studies. The second reason for the discipline’s uncertain presence in the academy has to do with the linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of the medieval geography we now call Spain. Prior to unification under the Catholic monarchs, Aragon, Andalusia, Castile, Catalonia, and Galicia were at one point or another autonomous political kingdoms with unique religious, linguistic, literary, and performance traditions. Despite decades of Francoist polemical historiography that stunted research and promoted a nationalist narrative of Castilian, Catholic centrality, the medieval performance archive reveals diverse, regional traditions. It is perhaps the motley complexion of Iberian performance that has discouraged theater scholars from entering the field. Despite these hurdles, important foundational scholarship, new discoveries, and interdisciplinarity, provide the bases for continued growth of an Iberian performance discipline. Charlotte Stern’s call in The Medieval Theater in Castile (Stern 1996, cited under General Overviews) for a “new poetics” appears to be taking hold: other scholars have embraced performance theory in their work, made inroads into aspects of popular entertainments, considered Islamic and Jewish participation in performance culture, and broadened the conversation by examining scenography and theatrical space. The present bibliography bridges the gap between old and new scholarship by including traditional texts and approaches along with primary materials often excluded from the conversation on Iberian drama, as well as critical works that engage the subject matter in an interdisciplinary manner.
Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, edited by Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy (Palgrave Macmillan), 2014
As the desire for affective experiences of the sacred increased in communities across Europe in t... more As the desire for affective experiences of the sacred increased in communities across Europe in the late Middle Ages, the Christian faithful crafted lifelike, mechanized figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and saints for use in religious festivals. Although each devotional culture evidences unique body/object relationships and meanings, in general animated ritual objects encouraged lay participation in the celebration of saints and the Passion by engaging the senses, and, consequently, an emotional sense of God. In this essay I investigate the ritual alliances between moveable, prop-like saints and their Iberian devotees, in particular the performative meanings that arose from encounters with technologies of the sacred.
Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, edited by Elina Gertsman (Routledge), 2011
Public weeping during Holy Week processions in late medieval Spain were emotional performances th... more Public weeping during Holy Week processions in late medieval Spain were emotional performances that could be learned and rehearsed. A variety of textual, visual, and doctrinal materials were available to lay penitents to assist them in achieving more profound—and more ritually efficacious—feelings of contrition and sadness. By comparing the compelling similarities between late medieval devotional practices and Constantin Stanislavsky’s methodological tools for achieving emotional and spiritual truth on stage, we may better understand the corporal and cognitive processes of social actors in ritual and theatrical arenas.
Journal of Religion and Theatre, 2006
Teaching Documents by Christopher Swift
https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/swiftthe2280idspring2021/
Teaching Portfolio by Christopher Swift
Uploads
Books by Christopher Swift
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
Articles and Book Chapters by Christopher Swift
Curation and design by Christopher Swift. Research by Christopher Swift, Diego Atauchi, Solangie Falla Crespo and Freddy Ruiz. Support provided by the National Endowment of the Humanities (A Cultural History of Digital Technology) and the City Tech Emerging Undergraduate Scholars grant.
The City Performs: An Architectural History of New York City Theaters by Christopher Swift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Email cswift@citytech.cuny.edu with suggestions for amendments and additions.
Teaching Documents by Christopher Swift
Teaching Portfolio by Christopher Swift
Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theatre by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville as the imperial centre of Christian Spain.
Curation and design by Christopher Swift. Research by Christopher Swift, Diego Atauchi, Solangie Falla Crespo and Freddy Ruiz. Support provided by the National Endowment of the Humanities (A Cultural History of Digital Technology) and the City Tech Emerging Undergraduate Scholars grant.
The City Performs: An Architectural History of New York City Theaters by Christopher Swift is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Email cswift@citytech.cuny.edu with suggestions for amendments and additions.