Coffee and Concepts: “Truth, Storytelling, and the Ethics of Dramatic Editing”

Laurie Frederik is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of performance studies and ethnography in the School of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies, University of Maryland. She was director of the Latin American Studies Center from 2014-2017 and remains a member of the advisory board. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, Women’s Studies, and the Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity.

Dr. Frederik has been conducting ethnographic research in Cuba for twenty years. Her first book, Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba, published by Duke University Press, received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book of 2012 by Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).  Her newest article about Cuba is titled “Poetic Imaginings of the Real Guantánamo (No, Not the Base),” published in both English and Spanish in Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom: the Humanities Respond (Palgrave 2017). Dr. Frederik co-edited Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power(University of Michigan Press 2017).