In some respects, Julie Townsend began working on her dissertation when she was 3 years old. "I was pigeon-toed and tripped over my own feet, so my mother put me into ballet class," Julie says. She studied ballet until she was 14, when damage to her knees prompted a move to modern dance.

Then, for several years, Julie pursued an academic career in French and English literature and became fluent in French. She was about three years into her graduate studies in comparative literature at UCLA when everything came together. "I started seeing all of these dancers in the literature of the late 19th century and early 20th century, which was the period that interested me," she says.

Gustave Flaubert, for example, projected the problems of French culture into central dance scenes in novels such as Salammbô and A rebours. Oscar Wilde wrote a play about Salome, using the dancer to explore erotic representation and aesthetic desire. Stéphane Mallarmé made the dancer embody an idea.

Comparative Literature dissertations usually cover three areas. Julie had French and English literature. The dance, in particular the works of Loie Fuller as represented in early French films, became her third area.

Fuller was the teacher of Isadora Duncan, who has been called the mother of modern dance. Unlike Duncan, who often danced in a simulation of nakedness, Fuller "wore these huge, billowy, white, sheetlike costumes, and she would move under them as light was projected onto the sheets," Julie says. "You saw the dance through the movement of her costume." Perhaps because Duncan's performances evoked more "comfortable metaphors of femininity," she became widely known, Julie surmises. Fuller, "who traveled around with 20 electricians, didn't fit into models of femininity as well," she says.

The interrelationship between modern dance and its representation in Modernist literature will be the subject of Julie's dissertation, now in progress under a UCLA dissertation year fellowship. She believes that Comparative Literature's history as an Interdepartmental Program-it became a department this year-may explain in part her mentors' open-mindedness to encourage her to combine film and dance with literature.

Moving between history, literature, and other fields, Julie's work represents "an interesting direction in comparative literary studies," says Professor Emily Apter, chair of Comparative Literature and Julie's dissertation committee. "I've seen her work develop in ways that are very exciting."

Julie says she was inspired by Apter's work, using visual arts, performance studies, and psychoanalysis in her work on French, African, and German literatures. "I just loved her classes because they drew from so many sources," Julie says. "It was such a dynamic learning environment."

A co-mentor has been Joe Bristow, a specialist in Victorian British literature and theory in the English Department. While Professor Apter "sends me off spinning in some new research direction," Professor Bristow offers pragmatic and technical advice, from detailed suggestions about written work to thoughts on positioning herself for the job market. "It's an amazing combination," Julie says.

As she looks ahead to her own career in academia, Julie hopes to find a position-perhaps a joint appointment in two departments-that will allow her the same flexibility. "I don't want to have to give up the interdisciplinary side of my work," she says. "It's the way I think."

Julie did her undergraduate work at New York University and UC San Diego. Before she started graduate school, she spent several months in France doing a little bit of everything from cleaning classrooms to selling smoothies on the street to support herself while she developed fluency in French. She returned to France in the 1996 academic year, this time digging into theater and film archives to "get an idea of what dancers looked like" in the period that interested her.

Julie is aware that dancers in academia, perhaps because they sometimes aren't accorded as much status as other fields, are often wary of outsiders doing dance research. "They get nervous that you're going to colonize dance with your literary ideas," Julie says, "and forget the dance part." As a result, Julie makes an effort "to stay connected with the dancer in me as well as the scholar in me."

She has even considered whether dance might contribute to the form as well as the content of her dissertation. "Can I write it like a dance," Julie asks herself, "and what would it look like?"

Published in Fall 1999, Graduate Quarterly