Judith Hamera’s scholarship is interdisciplinary, contributing to American, communication, and cultural studies, as well as performance and dance studies. Her research examines the social work of aesthetics, especially play with genre conventions for self-fashioning and community building on and off stage. Her latest book is Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Lives of the American Home Aquarium, 1870-1970 (University of Michigan Press, 2012). She is the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009) with Alfred Bendixen, and the author of Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (Studies in International Performance: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which received the Book of the Year award from the National Communication Association’s Ethnography Division. Other books are Opening Acts: Performance In/As Communication and Cultural Studies (Sage, 2006); and the Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, co-edited with D. Soyini Madison (2006).