Lee Gurdial Kaur Singh
Lecturer
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: AB Mount Holyoke College; MHA University of Iowa; PhD University of California, Riverside
Research Areas: Soviet history, cultural life in the Soviet Union; ballet history, critical dance studies, social history;
Lee Gurdial Kaur Singh (she/her) is a dance scholar and historian of Soviet cultural life. She earned her AB in Dance, cum laude, from Mount Holyoke College and her PhD in Modern Russian History from the University of California, Riverside. Singh's first book project, Ballet for Socialism's Sake: The Red Poppy at the Bolshoi Theater, 1927–1960, illuminates how Soviet artists and officials transformed ballet from an elite genre into a form of a socialist popular culture intended for the enjoyment and edification of mass audiences. Her other research interests include the logistics of theatrical production, the history of ballet pedagogy, Soviet restagings and resignifications of nineteenth-century ballets and operas from Russia and Western Europe, and mechanisms designed to popularize ballet and opera among diverse audiences past and present, including the intersections of opera and reality television in the twenty-first century. Singh's research has been funded in part by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education, a Dissertation Research Grant from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and a Title VIII Research Scholarship from the Kennan Institute, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.