Academic

Tanya Fernando works on both modernism and the contemporary arts—the literary, visual, and performing arts. She focuses on questions of aesthetics, politics, and race. She is currently completing a manuscript, “The Politics of Shock: Modernism, Primitivism, and Aesthetics.” The book explores how modernist artists used ‘shock’ as a radical technique to create a just world. It examines work by the surrealists, Walter Benjamin, Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinksy, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Post-Impressionists, and Theodor Adorno.

She is currently writing on dance:

"The Ekphrastic Body: Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works" in Dance Chronicle (Summer 2019)

"The New Millennium Minstrel Show" in The Brooklyn Rail (May 3, 2012)

In Progress

“Aesthetic Form and the Political: A Comparison of Postmodern and Black Dance”

“The Rite of Spring and the Yearning for the Sacred”