Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis pens NYTimes editorial on elephants in the circus
We're pleased to share with you all the news that Dr. Janet Davis, one of our core faculty members, published an editorial in the New York Times this past Sunday. She describes the history of elephants in the circus in light of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus's announcement that their traveling elephant performers would be retiring by 2018.See an excerpt below; the full editorial can be found here.
Elephants have been wildly popular in this country since 1796, when the first one arrived on American soil. Jacob Crowninshield, a ship’s captain from Salem, Mass., landed in New York City with a two-year-old Asian female from Calcutta. He sold the “Crowninshield Elephant” to an enterprising showman for $10,000. Thousands of eager Americans, including President John Adams, flocked to see the animal in taverns and courtyards, where audiences, fascinated by her trunk’s dexterity, plied her with gingerbread and wine. She and her keeper plodded from Rhode Island to New Orleans under cover of darkness for the next nine years because her owner was fearful of giving spectators a “free” look.Americans at the time were particularly receptive to the Crowninshield Elephant and the many others who followed her, in part, because of nationalistic myth: Thomas Jefferson believed that flesh-eating elephantine mammoths roamed the American West, and he expressly ordered Lewis and Clark to look for one on their trans-Mississippi expedition. Performing elephants gave live, physical form to Jefferson’s notion of the American mammoth.
But that's not all! Janet also contributed her expertise to this recent CNN piece on the circus's decision. See that article here.
Faculty Research: Janet Davis Interviewed in Spirit Magazine
Hey there, sports fans! We'd like to alert you to the fact that Dr. Janet Davis was recently interviewed for a lengthy piece on a young man's work in the circus in Spirit Magazine, the in-flight magazine for Southwest Airlines. Take a look at the excerpt below and click here to read the full piece.
Jesse’s challenge is more complex: In going to college, he was encouraged to step beyond a community in which he already knew his place. "All of a sudden you’ve got to rebuild, you know? And find your identity," he says. In high school, he was a big man on campus—the star jock, a promising scholar, the circus kid, a rural success story. At SMU, among the children of Dallas’ elite? “It seemed like the kids there were entitled to be there. One’s mom is the CEO of Victoria’s Secret. He lived in my dorm. I was like, 'Your mom owns Victoria’s Secret?' It’s heavy-duty; heavy-duty people. And I was like,'‘My dad owns a circus."'Plenty of college kids plow through these crises of self and set a course for their adult lives. If Jesse were just another boy shocked to discover that his strutting high school persona amounted to nothing in college, he might have toughed it out. But the circus offered an escape from the disorientation SMU stirred in him; it gave him a purpose. In bailing, Jesse wasn’t running away to join the circus, he was running home to it.Now he’ll have to pull off the same tricks his forebears did. Despite its robust past, the circus has repeatedly had to evolve to avoid extinction. Although today’s audiences are harder to come by, the circus arts have become popular among kids. More than 350 instructional youth circuses operate in America, a quarter of them having emerged in the past 10 years. "The challenge for Jesse’s generation," says author and circus historian Janet M. Davis, "is to bring all of these young people into the broader circus fold."
Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis to Deliver Keynote at "Circus and the City" Symposium
Attention, New Yorkers! Dr. Janet Davis, one of our faculty members, will be giving a keynote lecture to the Bard Graduate Center's Symposium, "Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010."From the Bard Graduate Center:
This half-day symposium is being held in conjunction with the Circus and the City exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center. The exhibition is made possible, in part, with support from the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and anonymous donors. The symposium focuses on the animals and performers that made the circus into such a spectacular and iconic form of entertainment in the United States. Brett Mizelle, “Contesting the Circus in American History: Animal Exhibitions and the Emergence of Animal Welfare,” historicizes debates over the legitimacy of the circus and charts the evolving relationship between the American public and animals over the course of the nineteenth century. Janet M. Davis, “Circus Queen in New York City: Flight, Spectacle, and the Fantastical Life of Tiny Kline,” uses the varied career of performer Tiny Kline to explore the world of popular amusements in the city during the early decades of the twentieth century. The symposium showcases the rich history and cultural legacy of the circus in New York City, and the two speakers will be joined by exhibition curator Matthew Wittmann, who will provide commentary.
The event is on Monday, October 15, 1:30pm-4:00pm. Be sure to RSVP if you're interested in attending. All details available here.In case you'd like to know more about the accompanying exhibition, the New York Times has a fabulous review, excerpted below:
Scholars of the arts in New York have long ignored the circus in favor of the city’s theatrical, musical and literary histories. But an ambitious new exhibition aims to fill that void. “Circus and the City: New York 1793-2010,” opening on Friday at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries, chronicles the rise, triumph and ultimate fragmentation of the circus through the lens of the city, making the case that the circus transformed entertainment, media and advertising and that the city itself played an important role in the evolution of the American circus.“Circus has primarily been thought of as a global and national phenomenon,” said Matthew Wittmann, curator of the show. “But New York City was an incubator for circus since it first arrived in America.”
Dr. Davis is also on the advisory board for this exhibition and contributed an essay to The American Circus, published in conjunction with this event.
Faculty Research: Janet Davis lectures at UVA Circus Festival
