Alexandra Kolb is Professor of Dance at Roehampton University. She is an experienced international speaker, panel and conference organizer, mentor, and peer reviewer for journals and academic publishers. At Roehampton, she teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including Ph.D. supervision, is the leader of the Ph.D. programme in the School of Arts with responsibility for more than seventy students, and chairs the MA Dance Philosophy and History programme. She is the Reviews Editor of Dance Research, sits on the AHRC Peer Review Committee, and serves on the board of the Society for Dance Research. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Grenoble Alpes.

She arrived at Roehampton in 2017 having previously lectured as Reader at Middlesex University (2012-2017), Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Dance programme at the University of Otago in New Zealand (2006-2012), and Coordinator of Academic Studies at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2005-2006). She has also worked in academic publishing in the fields of dance and music at a German publishing house, Olms. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and first-class Masters degrees from both Cambridge and Cologne.

Her research covers numerous aspects of the political, gender and interdisciplinary treatments of 20^th and 21^st-century dance. It has been supported by UK, US, German and New Zealand funding bodies and has won several prizes. She has published many academic articles and three books: Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (2009), the anthology Dance and Politics (2011), and most recently Dancing Europe: Identities, Languages, Institutions (2022, co-edited with Nicole Haitzinger). She is currently writing a monograph on “Dancing the Everyday: Choreographies of the Ordinary and their Corporeal Politics.” 

MA (Cologne), MPhil (Cambridge), PhD (Cambridge)

Reviews Editor, Dance Research

Executive Committee, SDR (Society for Dance Research),

AHRC Peer Review Committee

Advisory Board, Dance in Dialogue Book Series (Bloomsbury)

Fellow of the Cambridge European Society

Member of the Deutsche Tanzgesellschaft (Germany)

Member of ADSA (Australia)

Alexandra has convened and taught on a wide range of undergraduate and Master's modules, including Ways of Knowing; Dance, Culture and Society; Key Perspectives; Dance, History and Politics; Dance, History and Philosophy; Extended Essay, Gender, Sexualities and Performance; BA Dissertation; MA Dissertation; Choreomundus Dissertation Writing Class; Classicism and Power; Representing and Embodying Dance History; and Dance Anthropology.

Ph.D. supervisor:

2020 Phaedra Petsilas: Towards a new politics of dance pedagogy in the traditional conservatoire, Director of Studies

2020 Crystal (Siyuan) Gong: Audience reception, creative processes and global culture, Director of Studies

2019 Elisabeth Motley: Indeterminable Bodies: Rethinking Choreographies of Deviance, Divergence, and Disability, Director of Studies

2019 Fabienne Formosa: Moving Gender and Mental Health: A Practice-Based Investigation, co-supervisor

2018 Magdalen Gorringe: Professionalising Culture: Love, License, Labour and Lawmakers – British South Asian Arts organisations and the Professionalisation of South Asian dance in Britain, co-supervisor

2018 Andrea Paz Torres Viedma: Moving with-being moved: improvisation as a practice of togetherness, Director of Studies

2017 Rowan McLelland: Examining the Red Corps: An Investigation into the Adoption, Revolution, and Continued Development of Ballet in China, co-supervisor

She welcomes potential research degree students to discuss proposals for study in the following areas:

• Dance and politics
• Dance and gender 
• German modern dance
• Dance and the everyday 
• Dance and literature
• Collaboration and interdisciplinarity
• Ballet studies