Dr Rob Baum

Background

Rob’s post-doctorate on Middle Eastern gender, ritual and religious performativity interrupted a promising life at sea.

Creative Work

Rob has received a number of artist grants and distinctions for performance, playwriting and poetry, including several Irene Ryan Playwriting Awards and Alaskan Daily News Creative Writing Awards, two Singapore National Artist Grants, and a Great Alaskan Playrush. Her latest play, Every Woman’s War, was read at the International Magdalena Women’s Festival (Singapore National Museum, 2006), and recent poetry appears in The Aroostook Review, Nashim, Box-Car and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She performs in theatre, dance, circus and movement improvisation.

Community Work

Rob is the Director of the Integrate Stretch, a performance collective for people with mixed abilities, including cognitive, physical and sensorial disabilities. They have collaborated with international musicians, creating sound-movement collages and contemporary theatre, and in 2007 performed At the Bridge (of Mind) at the Dance Movement Therapy Association of Australia Conference. Rob also serves as Convenor of the International Dance Therapy Institute of Australia.

Research

My interests are diverse and multi-modal, but generally gravitate around cultural and social absences and politics of identity. Within our cultures, communities and social practices, some people are unseen, unheard, disempowered or “disappeared;” these absences diminish the individual but also the social collective. As an advocate of disability discourse, I work intimately with these issues, and my academic writing, poetry, plays and performance texts illuminate these cultural losses.

Conventional structures of research into memory and trauma led to my current book project on the Holocaust and Jewish identity. But lived experience with survivors of contemporary catastrophe— concentration camp survivors, ex-Prisoners of War (WWII and VietNam), veterans of war and conflict, and their families—gave rise to my ongoing research into captivity, torture and post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma has far-reaching implications, altering the body at the cellular level, affecting not only those who bear traumatic witness, but also spouses, children, and future generations. Trans-generational transmission is only now beginning to be recognised; it must be understood, and treated. Pondering this absence of care generated my desire to provide relief for trauma survivors and their descendants. I am now developing new clinical frameworks for treating trauma, using art-based therapeutic modalities.

Publications

Books

Female Absence: Women, Theatre & Other Metaphors. Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2003.

Book Chapters

“Chasing Horses, Eating Arabs.” Islamic Masculinities. London: Zed Books, 2006. 105-118.

“From Elks to Aliyah.” Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater. ed. Robin Bernstein. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 195-204.

“Crossing the Lines of Gender and Color: Viewers Respond to Fires in the Mirror.” Race Gender Media: Considering Diversity Across Audiences, Content and Producers. ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2003. 84-91.

“Eskesta in Israel.” Performing Democracy: International Perspectives of Urban Community-Based Performance. eds. Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. 292-301.

“Salomé: Re/dressing Wilde on the Rim.” The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives. ed. Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor. Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2000. 205-218.

“Iphigenia Obscene: The (Dis)appearance from Aulis.” (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre. eds. Savas Patsalidis and Elizabeth Sakellaridou. Thessaloniki: University Studio Theatre, 1999. 385-403.

“Not Funny: Metaphor, Dream & Decapitation.” Enjoyment: From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, The Fine Arts, and Aesthetics. ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998. 105-126.

“Mad Messiah: Censorship and Salvation in Bulgakov’s Flight.” Themes in Drama series. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1992. 137-149.