A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Terri smiles at the camera, mouth closed. She wears a grey hat, blue shirt and a big silver pendant.

On This Page

Terri Kapsalis

Professor, Adjunct

Contact

Bio

Education: BA, Anthropology, 1988, University of Michigan; MA/PhD, Performance Studies,1994, Northwestern University.

Terri Kapsalis is the author of Jane Addams' Travel Medicine Kit (commissioned by the Hull-House Museum, a collaboration with forensic scientists, installed in Jane Addams' bedroom as an alternative label alongside her kit for a "slow museum" experience), Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls, based on primary medical writings on hysteria from ancient Egypt to the present and written like a Victorian children's alphabet book, also a multi-media performance with film and live soundtrack performed with John Corbett and Danny Thompson throughout the U.S.), and Public Privates:  Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press – the only book reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Village Voice, and a medical fetishist site The Amateur Gynecologist.)

Stories and essays have appeared online and in various edited volumes and in journals including Short Fiction, The Baffler, Denver Quarterly, and Parakeet.

Along with John Corbett and Anthony Elms, she co-edited Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black, and Other Solar Myths and Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-futurist Underground and co-curated the touring exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds.

As an improvising violinist, Kapsalis has a discography that includes work with Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, Mats Gustafsson, and Thurston Moore.

She is a founding member of Theater Oobleck and has performed in over thirty productions since 1985.

Since 1991, she is a collective member and health educator at the Chicago Women's Health Center where she co-founded the Trans Health Program and the Integrative Health Program and co-created Season One of the CWHC podcast "Mirror and a Flashlight."

Her SAIC course "Wandering Uterus: Journeys through Gender, Race, and Medicine" has been written about by former students in Bomb and the L.A. Weekly blog and featured in an essay by Kapsalis on LitHub.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course enables upper-level students to develop a well-researched thesis project on a topic of their choice. Such a thesis project may be linked to their final BFA thesis or studio project, and may be useful for students considering graduate school in a field in which research and writing expertise is required. Students may choose to enlist innovative formats and incorporate a variety of media. Topics as diverse as 'Gay Cinema,' 'Culture as Industry,' 'Is Rap Subversive?,' 'The Art and Science of Fragrance,' and 'The Morphology of the Toy Soldier Body' have been explored. Class meetings are used to share research methods, discuss the given challenges of various projects, and present works-in-progress for critique.

Class Number

1954

Credits

3

Description

This interdisciplinary course approaches the topic of gender, race, and medicine from cultural, historical, and scientific perspectives. We consider hysteria (purported to be caused by a 'wandering uterus') and other mental afflictions associated with sex and gender, the foundation of U.S. gynecology and its dependence on enslaved bodies, the Women's Health Movement and its legacy, queer and trans health issues, and sex health education. Readings include works by Audre Lourde, Elaine Showalter, and Loretta Ross. We will also consider the ways in which artists have addressed issues of gender, race and medicine in their work. Assignments include an interview project, written reflections, and a final research-based project.

Class Number

2393

Credits

3

Description

This seminar consists of weekly studio visits, discussions, and small group critiques. Students are expected to arrive with completed and semi-completed works and be prepared to make and re-make new works throughout the summer sessions. A wide variety of readings chosen by faculty will guide discussions that concentrate on problems concerning methods of artmaking, distribution, and interpretation. Readings will include examples drawn from the emerging category of conceptual writing as well as crucial art historical texts, literature, and poetry.

Class Number

1215

Credits

3

Description

Over the course of each six-week summer residency period, all students in the Low- Res MFA program engage with a series of world renowned artists and scholars to expand our collective conceptual frameworks and discourses. Invited speakers participate in our Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series. They deliver a public lecture open to the entire SAIC and Chicago community and the general public, and then participate in a Colloquium the next day exclusively for Low-Res MFA students. Each Colloquium takes place with the artist present, and is a space where the artist¿s work and concepts (direct or adjacent) are discussed, questions are raised, and topics are debated. Colloquium asks for consensus, but rather a dynamic and in depth discursive exploration of ideas. This form allows for a multiplicity of voices to build on concepts through questioning, contributing, challenging, and listening to each other. The colloquium is considered a Gift anchored with the presence of the visiting artist. This Gift is generated by enacting full attention to the concepts present in the artist or scholar¿s work. In the spirit of Lewis Hyde, the Gift is an exchange which generates or propagates further attention and exchange in culture. Thus, the Colloquium is a Gift meant to propagate further exchange in the world, as artists and citizens.

Class Number

1228

Credits

1.5

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

2002

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester across the Graduate Division, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1936

Credits

3