Emily Hardick is a Ph.D. candidate in African history (with minor fields in colonial history and dance studies). Her research examines the transnational circulation of dance performance and the cultural politics of performing arts within colonial and authoritarian regimes. Her dissertation, Choreographing (Im)mobility: Touring Performance and the Cultural Politics of Movement in the Congo, addresses these themes in the context of colonial and postcolonial Democratic Republic of the Congo, from the 1930s to the early 1990s. This project follows the international tours of Congolese performance troupes, their relationships to international arts organizations, and their role in the performance of colonial subjecthood and postcolonial national identity. Her research has been supported by Fulbright Belgium, the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, and the OSU Mershon Center for International Security Studies, among others. 

Emily's research is forthcoming in The Journal of African History ; other published writing can be found in Africa Today, African Studies Quarterly, and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. As an instructor at OSU, she has taught HIST 2302: History of Modern Africa, 1800-1960s and HIST 2650: The World since 1914. 

Outside of her dissertation project, Emily is broadly interested in exhibition and museum histories, immaterial cultural practices, and Global North-South mobility. She has explored these themes a member of the Belgo-Congolese artistic research collective Tracer since 2022, which has shown pieces in Belgium, Germany, and the DRC.