Assad Assad, PhD
👁️
☀️
Education
PhD
Integrative Studies
Brown U. 2024
A.M.
Theatre and Performance Studies
Brown U. 2024
MA
Dramatic Reception Studies (Ancient World)
UCL 2016
BA
Individualized Studies, Liberal Arts: Drama, narrative, and performance theories
Goddard College 2015
Contact:
death doula work:
birdwingholisticcare@gmail.com
Fellowships and Awards
2023 Graduate Fellowship, The John Hay Library Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, Brown University.
2023 Brown Arts Institute Student Grant, Brown University BAI.
2022 Graduate Student Travel Award, Dance Studies Association.
2019 Thomas Marshall Graduate Student Award, American Society for Theatre Research.
2016 Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities 4-Year Graduate Fellowship, The Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University.
"From my foundation in theater and performance studies, I research the history of the body, theories of embodiment, and their applications in medicine.
A nursing supervisor once said to me: "You can't train for that " after observing how I worked with a non-verbal, terminally ill patient. She was commenting on how I held space with the patient, and communicated beyond words. I thought to myself -- you certainly can train for that. But it would be a performance studies course!
My research and teaching focuses on developing new scholarly awareness, method, and techniques that bring science, medicine, and theater, and dance together.
Theatrical arts have a historical role in informing science, tech, and medicine, not simply as enrichment, but as invaluable frameworks and techniques.
And of course, the inverse is true: Science, technology, and medicine, are intrinsic to theater and performance. No matter how 'post-modern' it becomes, theater cannot fully reject empiricism -- observation and the senses are at the heart of what it means to perform."
Licenses and Certifications
End-of-Life Doula (University of Vermont) 2026
Certified Hospice and Palliative Aide, 2026
Certified Nursing Aide, 2024
Home Health Aide, 2024
find my writing here:
Dance Research
What is the Opposite of the Body? in: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices (Posthumanism in Practice), Bloomsbury 2026
Whose Technology? In: The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science, 2025
Book Reviews
Beyond the periphery of the skin: rethinking, remaking, and reclaiming the body in contemporary capitalism by Sylvia Federici in Women and Performance 2020
Dance Practice Gallery: Persian modern dance
now i must speak. though with who? always with you. self love is redundant. the sun is in my chest. the moon is in my throat. loneliness throws itself off a cliff in the emergence of your face. ceases to be in the eternal kiss. i was self conscious about my two faces for so long: from childhood feeling it like a constant nag or rip tide. why am i two people in one? why am i completely wrapped up like the mercurial snakes on a caduceus? my longing faced inwards, my love combusted deep beneath the sea of something inaccessible to anyone. medical science has no conception of it. i heard my own voice as clear as a constellation. emanating from cor leonis in an overpowering and yet fully transparent call. through the ceiling i saw right through to the bluest night sky. there was no possible answer, there was only an immediate union. and in that union one became two, and in that union two became one. and all the stars revolved around it.