Theater professor named 2023 Arts Research with Communities of Color Fellow

Professor kt shorb is one of seven scholars nationwide who has been selected for a 2023-24 Arts Research with Communities of Color (ARCC) Fellowship. Administered by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the ARCC Fellowship is an initiative devoted to exploring how social science research can contribute to a thriving and more equitable arts field through empirical research, theory building, and analysis, in addition to supporting a new generation of researchers. 

“Having these big spaces of time to interact with a community of artists and to think through some things that I’ve been chewing on for a while is really a gift,” said Dr. shorb. 

With support from The Wallace Foundation, Professor shorb and the other ARCC Fellows will receive funding to conduct 12-month qualitative-ethnographic studies in collaboration with select organizations participating in Wallace’s arts initiative. Professor shorb’s fellowship work will be in partnership with St. Paul-based Theater Mu, one of the largest Asian American theater companies in the nation. They plan to explore at least one theoretical question pertaining to the Asian American aesthetic, as well as one grounded in theater practice and the space. 

“My previous research examined how performance enacts moments of time travel, so time and space are theoretically interesting to me,” said shorb, who is also the vice president for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists, the only national service organization for theater artists of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. “But also theater is all about time and space, and how you manipulate and create aesthetic decisions around it. I want to look at both.” 

In addition to their research, ARCC Fellows will participate in cohort-wide activities to encourage collaborative learning and professional growth. The program also provides opportunities for mentorship and networking with leading researchers and practitioners in the field, with a primary goal to help build a community of early-career scholars, particularly scholars of color, to pursue innovative research about the arts.