Laurie Frederik is associate professor of performance studies in TDPS and is director of the Latin American Studies Center. She is also an active affiliate faculty member in the Department of Anthropology. Her first book, Trumpets in the Mountains: Theater and the Politics of National Culture in Cuba, published by Duke University Press, received Honorable Mention for Outstanding Book of 2012 by ATHE. It is based on over a decade of ethnographic research, including two and a half years living in some of Cuba’s most remote mountainous areas called “zones of silence” in Santa Clara and Guantánamo Provinces. She continues to conduct research in and about Cuba.  

Frederik recently co-edited a volume titled Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power, coming out with University of Michigan Press in spring 2017. In it, Frederik writes about the judgment of social audiences, competition, and about how “showing” has political agency in the world. She also contributes an auto-ethnographic chapter that analyzes race and nationality in Latin dance.

Her newest research explores genres of true storytelling performance as social activism and production of cultural identity. In this project, she examines truth, testimony, and translation in legal culture and courtrooms of the United States and Puerto Rico.

Frederik teaches classes on the anthropology of art, ethnographic method, the role of artists and intellectuals in society, political ritual, subversive culture and social protest, national identity, censorship, creativity, and the performativity of law and justice.