Jane Taylor (writer)
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Jane Taylor (19 April 1956 - 6 September 2023) was a
In 1987, she and David Bunn co-edited From South Africa (University of Chicago Press), an anthology which documents the Years of Emergency in the last decade of apartheid in that country, through new photography, graphics, literature. In 1994, she and David Bunn curated the exhibition "Displacements" at the Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Illinois. In 1996, she curated "Fault Lines," an exhibition at Cape Town Castle on truth and reconciliation. "Fault Lines" was also, more broadly, a series of cultural responses which she initiated in order to draw artists from the international community into exploring the discourses and practices of Truth and Reconciliation. She wrote about Jarry's Pere Ubu [1] and she also wrote the playtext of "Ubu and the Truth Commission" with artist/director William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company.
In 2001, she wrote the libretto for The Confessions of Zeno for Kentridge and Handspring. She later edited Handspring Puppet Company (David Krut publishers, 2009), a substantial study of this world-renowned South African performance troupe.
Taylor was a co-editor of Refiguring the Archive, a volume which surveyed the field of archive fever[clarification needed] in the last decade (Kluwer Academic Press); and curated the exhibition, "Holdings", which engaged with the question of value, the archive and memory.
She received the prestigious Olive Schreiner Prize for new fiction for her Of Wild Dogs in 2006.
In 2009, she published The Transplant Men, a novel that examines the life of the South African heart surgeon,
She received Fellowships from Mellon and Rockefeller, and was a visiting professor at Oxford and at Cambridge. From 2000 to 2009, she was the Skye Chair of Dramatic Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. In Fall 2011, she was Writer-in-Residence at Northwestern University. For several years she was a periodic Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.
The Renaissance scholar
She was an advisor for dOCUMENTA 2012. She and medievalist David Nirenberg exchanged a series of letters as one of the published notebooks (online at www3.documenta.de/uploads/tx_publications/103_Taylor-Nirenberg.pdf) for dOcumenta. From 2013-2016, she held the Wole Soyinka Chair of Theatre at the University of Leeds. In 2016, she was Visiting Avenali Chair of the Humanities at University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, she published Being Led By the Nose (University of Chicago), a study of the artist/director William Kentridge’s production of Shostakovitch’s opera The Nose for the New York Metropolitan Opera. She had an abiding interest in the History and Theory of the performance of sincerity and explored this question with regard to the histories of performance, the law, and theology.
References
- ^ Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2007