Nick Salvato

Research

Nick Salvato's approach to the study of performance, media, and culture is guided by a combination of close analysis, archival research, and theoretical argumentation. More specifically, he seeks to elaborate, complicate, and extend the purview of ideas about the modern, the minor, and their relationships to one another. In a variety of ways and contexts, he focuses attention on performances and media, representational practices, discourses, and dispositions that are figured (often dismissively) by critics as minor or that announce themselves deliberately as minor; and at the same time, he considers the ways in which the concept of minority influences or defines the modern, even as minority conceals the centrality of its definitional power and influence. 

Thus the objects of his scrutiny include theatrical modes and genres that have been deliberately positioned as minor (closet drama) or dismissed by critics as minor (melodrama, parody, soap opera); survivalist forms of expression (camp) and species of discourse (gossip) that have been deployed by minoritarian subjects; aesthetic distinctions (amateur, kitsch, trash) by which cultural artifacts have been pejoratively categorized as minor; periods and styles of performance (early American theatre, the musical) that have been treated as minor in the university classroom; and figures and types (fag hags, tramps) whose marginalization and minorization have rendered them largely illegible in or unavailable to humanistic scholarship.