Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance

Research and Teaching interests include: Performance Studies; Standup comedy; Humor in use; Stigma; Diasporic Femisnist Film; Queer studies; Disability studies; Ethnographic Writing/Ethnographic Methods; Anthropology of Parents & Children. Geographical areas: India and the U.S.

Prof. Seizer's first ethnographic research project focused on the lives of popular theater artists in Tamilnadu, South India. Her book, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama artists in South India (Duke University Press, 2005) won the prestigious A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2007. Her ethnographic documentary film "Road Comic: Big Work on Small Stages (2012) turns an anthropological lens on the lives of road comics in the contemporary U.S.

Prior to becoming an anthropologist, Seizer was a performer of dance, theater, and circus. Many of her scholarly interests follow threads she first explored as a performer: improvisation; the way comedy can be used to do just about anything; and the particular exhilaration many women find in transgressing normative gender roles through public performance.