After many years going back to making academic books, to reworking old writings and co-writing new ones with my former professor and mentor Aleksandra Jovićević:
Cognitive Architecture of Critical Performance Studies (Architettura cognitiva e critica dei performance studies)
Aleksandra Jovićević & Ana Vujanović
Rome: Luca Sossella Editore, 2026
ISBN 979-12-5998-108-0
This book – published in Italian language and to an extent for the Italian context – offers a comprehensive introduction and critical reflection on performance studies, a relatively recent and interdisciplinary field that examines performance as a broad continuum of human and cultural actions, from ritual, play, and everyday social behavior to theatre, dance, and experimental artistic practices. Drawing on anthropology, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and feminist, gender, queer, and cultural studies, the authors explore how performance operates not only in the arts but across social, political, and cultural life.
The volume examines how contemporary transformations in European and global(ized) society – such as technological change, mediatization, ecological crises, bioethical debates, and global exploitative neoliberal structures – shape both artistic performance and the ways we analyze it. It situates performance studies as an open and evolving “post-discipline” that challenges traditional academic boundaries while developing new interdisciplinary methods and perspectives.
Combining theoretical analysis with critical reflection on the institutionalization of the field, the book also highlights key methodological directions in performance studies: the study of embodied repertoires and repeated behaviors, the integration of artistic practice and theory, anthropological “thick description,” and the engagement of performance with social and political processes.
By connecting performance to broader questions of perception, embodiment, and public action, Architettura cognitiva e critica dei performance studies proposes performance as a way of understanding experience, culture, and political life. The book serves as a guide for readers interested in performance studies and related fields such as postfeminist, postcolonial, queer, Black and Indigenous studies, as well as contemporary debates in aesthetics and philosophy of the arts.
Art direction: Alessandra Maiarelli
Translation: Tina Perić, Aleksandra Jovićević
Language editing: Giulia Mastropietro, Chiara Pagano, Daniele Vergni
Publisher: Luca Sossella Editore / MML srl