Riley, Shannon Rose
Professor of Creative Arts & Humanities, Humanities Department
Coordinator, Creative Arts Program
Public Voices Fellow with the SJSU Op-Ed Project, 2022-23
Associate Vice Chair, Academic Senate, 2017-18; 2018-19
Senator for the College of H&A, Academic Senate, 2011-present
Preferred: shannonrose.riley@sjsu.edu
Alternate: CreativeArts.SJSU@gmail.com
Telephone
Preferred: (408) 924-1365
Alternate: (408) 924-4481 (Creative Arts general number)
Office Hours
By appointment
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Davis, 2006
- Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Studio Art and Critical Theory, School of The Museum of Fine Arts & Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts, 1998
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Sculpture, with a minor in Art History, Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, 1995
Licenses and Certificates
- Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist (RSME/T), International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), 2021
Bio
Shannon Rose Riley is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She is a Professor in the Humanities Department, where she teaches courses in Humanities, Creative Arts, and American Studies. She is also the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program and an elected member of the Academic Senate.
Before coming to SJSU in 2008, Dr. Riley was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women's InterCultural Leadership at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, where she had joint appointment to the Department of Communication and Performance Studies and the Intercultural Studies Program (2006-08). From 1998 to 2002, she was the founding Dean of Students at Maine College of Art in Portland. Professor Riley has been an elected member of the Academic Senate at SJSU since 2011, serving primarily on the Professional Standards Committee, but also serving two terms as the Associate Vice Chair of the Academic Senate and Chair of the Committee on Committees. She served two terms as Chair of the Department of Humanities (2015-2019; 2019-2023) and was a Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project and SJSU in 2022-23.
Professor Riley has a PhD in Performance Studies and Critical Theory from the University of California, Davis (2006), an MFA in Studio Art (Performance, Video, Installation) from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1998). She completed a BFA in Sculpture and Art History from Maine College of Art (1995), and pursued broad undergraduate training in the arts and humanities at the University of Notre Dame, University of Colorado, Boulder, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, Dr. Riley completed training to become a Registered Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist (RSME/T) with the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA). She is currently involved in several community collaborations that explore the use of somatics in relation to healing and social justice.
Dr. Riley publishes widely and in several genres. She is co-editor, with Sondra Fraleigh, of Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages, on the Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance series with Routledge (2024). She is the author of Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti, & US Culture, 1898-1940 (Palgrave 2016), which examines the ways that Cuba and Haiti—both as signs and as sites—were crucial to the imaginative rethinking of race in the US at the turn of the 20th century. She is co-editor, with Lynette Hunter, of Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Palgrave, 2009, 2014). Riley's creative non-fiction essay, "Loving a Hornworm in End-Times: Connecting to the Small in Nature," was published in Catamaran Literary Reader (2020), and “The Ten Years War,” in Uprooting: Surviving Cycles of Domestic Abuse (2022/23). Her first piece as a Public Voices Fellow for the Op-Ed Project was published in The Hill Reporter (2022). Riley's scholarly essays appear in Theatre Topics, English Language Notes, Performing Arts Resources, and Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance as well as in the edited collections Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (Routledge, forthcoming), Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Palgrave, 2013), Kathy Acker and Transnationalism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Palgrave, 2009, 2nd edition 2014). Her book reviews appear in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2013) and TDR: The Drama Review (2015). She is currently working on more short non-fiction and a longer piece of fiction related to her recent research in Cuba and Haiti.
Professor Riley’s visual and performance works have been exhibited/staged internationally at numerous venues, including the ICA (Portland ME), Mobius (Boston), Randolph Street Gallery and Artemisia Gallery (Chicago), the Cushwa-Leighton Library (Notre Dame IN), Mainz Germany (2001), Stanford (2013), the Festival Nacional de Pequeño Formato (Santa Clara Cuba, 2006), and Month of Performance Art-Berlin (2013).
Since 1980, Riley has been a core member of the Chicago-based gospel/noise/performance group, ONO. The ONO discography includes the albums, Albino (Moniker Records, 2012), Diegesis (Moniker Records, 2014), Spooks (Moniker Records, 2015), and Your Future is Metal (American Damage Records, 2018). ONO's latest album, Red Summer (American Dreams Records, 2020) was reviewed by Noah Berlatsky on grammy.com and was streamed on The Wire. ONO's next album, Sacrifice|Sacrificial, will be released by American Dreams Records on August 2, 2024. Riley and ONO-mates, travis and P.Michael Grego, also published a dialogue, “ONO Epistemologies: Resounding the ‘Bleeding Haints,’” in a special issue of Performance Matters: Sound Acts, Part 1. Vol. 6, Iss. 2 (Winter 2020).
Publications
BOOKS
Fraleigh, Sondra and Shannon Rose Riley, eds. Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages. New York & London: Routledge, Studies in Theatre, Ecology and Performance Series, 2024.
Riley, Shannon Rose. Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti, & US Culture, 1898-1940, Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Series, New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2016.
Riley, Shannon Rose and Lynette Hunter, eds. Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
CHAPTERS
Fraleigh, Sondra and Shannon Rose Riley, “Introduction: Locating Geographies of Us,” Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages. Eds. S. Fraleigh and S.R. Riley. New York & London: Routledge, Studies in Theatre, Ecology and Performance Series, 2024, 1-13.
Riley, Shannon Rose. “A Critical Ecosomatics: Cultivating Awareness and Imagination,” in Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages. Chapter 1. Eds. S. Fraleigh and S.R. Riley. New York & London: Routledge, Studies in Theatre, Ecology and Performance Series, 2024, 17-35.
_____. “Moving with Cats,” Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages. Chapter 8. Eds. S. Fraleigh and S.R. Riley. New York & London: Routledge, Studies in Theatre, Ecology and Performance Series, 2024, 158-182.
Riley, Shannon Rose and Lynette Hunter. “Introduction.” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, Eds. S.R. Riley and L. Hunter. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014/2009, xv-xxiv.
Riley, Shannon Rose. “Lab/Studio.” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, Eds. S.R. Riley and L. Hunter. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014/2009, 137-141.
_____. “Miss Translation Goes to Cuba: Performance as Research toward a Performative Ethnography.” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, Eds. S.R. Riley and L. Hunter. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014/2009, 214-222.
_____. “Why Performance as Research?—a U.S. Perspective.” Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Ed., Robin Nelson, New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 175-87.
_____. “Kathy Goes to Haiti: Sex, Race, and Occupation in Kathy Acker’s Voodoo Travel Narrative.” Kathy Acker and Transnationalism. Eds. Polina Mackay and Kathryn Nicol, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 29-49.
PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES
Riley, Shannon Rose, P. Michael Grego, and travis. “ONO Epistemologies: Resounding the ‘bleeding haints,’” Performance Matters special issue: Sound Acts, Part 1. Vol. 6, Iss. 2 (Winter 2020): 60-69. NB: download PDF to play embedded sound files. https://performancematters-thejournal.com/index.php/pm/article/view/301
Riley, Shannon Rose. “Mistaken Identities, Miscegenation, & Missing Origins: The Curious Case of Haiti.” Performing Arts Resources, Special Issue: A Tyranny of Documents: The Performing Arts Historian as Film Noir Detective, Volume 28 (Winter 2011): 252-262.
_____. “Racing the Archive: Will the Real William DuBois Please Stand Up?” English Language Notes (ELN) 45.1 (Spring/Summer 2007): 103-110. Peer-reviewed Article.
_____. “Embodied Perceptual Practices: Towards an Embrained and Embodied Model of Mind for Use in Actor Training and Rehearsal.” Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004): 445-71. Peer-reviewed Article.
OP-EDs
Riley, Shannon Rose. “Democracy May Be on the Wane This Midterm Election Day; Perhaps It Never Existed in the U.S.” Commentary. The Hill Reporter, November 17, 2022.
CREATIVE NON-FICTION & FICTION
Riley, Shannon Rose. “The Ten Years War,” Uprooting: Surviving Cycles of Domestic Abuse. McCutcheon, Jade Rosina and Kristin Thomas, eds., Portland, OR: The Poetry Box Press, September 2023.
_____. “The Ten Years War,” Uprooting: Surviving Cycles of Domestic Abuse. McCutcheon, Jade Rosina and Kristin Thomas, eds., Salem, OR: ABC Printers, 2022. Published as a fundraiser for Sable House, Oregon.
_____. “Loving a Hornworm in End-Times: Connecting to the Small in Nature,” Catamaran Literary Reader, Vol. 8, Iss. 1 (#28), Spring 2020, 75-80. Creative nonfiction in acclaimed print literary journal; archived online: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50a3e7b0e4b0216a96954b82/t/60297d656bde4077e06461b0/1613331822698/Loving+a+Hornworm+in+End+Times+-.pdf
_____. “Shh,” Karen Gutfreund, ed., San Francisco: Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. 2019, invited peer-reviewed short fiction, p 106. https://issuu.com/mrpotani/docs/f213_catalog_for_issuu
_____. “Juror Statement.” F*ck U! In the Most Loving Way, Karen Gutfreund, ed., San Francisco: Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. 2017, 90-91.
REVIEWS
Riley, Shannon Rose. “Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba by Laurie A. Frederik; Cuba Inside Out: Revolution and Contemporary Theatre by Yael Prizant.” Books review. TDR: The Drama Review, 59:2 (Summer 2015): 170-73. Books review in leading peer-reviewed journal.
_____. “Almanacs, Street Names, and Symbolic Gestures: Producing the Cuban Nation in Daily Life: a Book Review of A Cultural History of Cuba During the US Occupation, 1898-1902 by Marial Utset (U of North Carolina Press).” Book review. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 12.2 (April 2013): 273-76. Book review in peer-reviewed journal.
_____. “Alice Neel and Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker.” Films review. Films for the Feminist Classroom, 4.1 (Spring Summer 2012), http://www.signs.rutgers.edu/rev_Shannon_Rose_Riley_4-1.html.
_____. “Horizon.” Performance review. Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance 3.1 (2006): 101-105.