Harris is an associate professor with the School of Education’s Dance Department.

Her book challenges the belief that George Balanchine’s arrival in the U.S. marked the origin of the bold neoclassical style that is celebrated as the first American manifestation of the art form. By revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet, Harris situates American ballet within a larger context of modernisms and examines critical efforts to craft new, modernist ideas about the relevance of classical dancing for American society and democracy.

Each January, Choice publishes its Outstanding Academic Titles (OAT) list. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice during the previous calendar year. This year’s complete list features 455 books and digital resources from 141 publishers.

Harris is a dance historian and certified movement analyst. Her work has appeared in Dance Chronicle, Performing Arts Resources, Discourses in Dance, Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange, Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, and Il futurismo nelle avanguardie. Harris also is editor of “Before, Between, Beyond,” the most recent collection of dance historian Sally Banes’s writings.