Shelley Salamensky

About Shelley

• Assistant Professor
• Office: 3334 Macgowan
• E-mail:
• Phone: 310-204-1577

Biography

S.I. Salamensky is a literary and performance scholar. Before coming to UCLA, she studied English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University and at the Ecole Normal Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Harvard and at Williams College. In Wilde Words: Performance and the Proto-Modernist Cultural Imagination, the book project she recently completed, she traces the fascinating, often bizarre, ways in which linguistic, theatrical, and cultural performance came to compete for social influence with other central forces of the 19th century. Wilde Words builds upon her volume Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation, a collection of work by scholars across disciplines on the quotidian chat that, while seldom the focus of scholarship, largely constitutes the texture and substance of our lives.

Two prospective future projects are working-titled Homefulness: Staging Culture, Time and Place in the Global Age and Immaterial Science: Pain, Cure, and the Staging of Knowledge. She is affiliated with UCLA’s Center for Performance Studies, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and Center for Jewish Studies. She has won awards for her teaching.