Hannah Kosstrin is a dance historian who focuses on Jewish and Israeli dance in global contexts. Her research and teaching interests include dance histories of the United States, Israel and the Jewish diaspora, Latin America, Europe, South Asia, and the African diaspora; gender and queer theory; migration and diaspora studies; Laban movement notation and analysis; and digital humanities.

Her first monograph, Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (Oxford University Press, 2017; Finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award), examines the transnational circulation of American modernism through Anna Sokolow’s choreography among communist and Jewish currents of the international Left from the 1930s to the 1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Her current book project Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations (under contract in the Studies in Dance Theory Series of Oxford University Press) queries Jewish dance migrations between Israel and the United States between the Cold War and Covid. Her article “Whose Jewishness? Inbal Dance Theater and Cold War American Spectatorship” (American Jewish History, 2020) was awarded a Gertrude Lippincott Award Honorable Mention from the Dance Studies Association. Dr. Kosstrin’s work also appears in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, The International Journal of Screendance, Journal of Israeli History, Journal of Jewish Identities, Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies (eds. Bales and Eliot, Oxford UP, 2013), Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (ed. Croft, Oxford UP, 2017), The Futures of Dance Studies (eds. Manning, Ross, and Schneider, Wisconsin, 2020), and the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (eds. Jackson, Pappas, and Shapiro-Phim, 2021). She is project director for KineScribe, a Labanotation iPad app supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Reed College, and Ohio State, and Faculty Lead for LabanLens, a Laban-based HoloLens application supported by Ohio State.

Dr. Kosstrin has served on the editorial boards of Studies in Dance History and the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, on the boards of directors of the Dance Studies Association, Congress on Research in Dance, and Society of Dance History Scholars, and as a member of the Dance Notation Bureau Professional Advisory Committee. From 2004 to 2007 she worked with Columbus Movement Movement which was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2007. She holds BA and MA degrees in dance from Goucher College and Ohio State, a PhD in Dance Studies with a minor field in women’s history from Ohio State, and Labanotation Teacher Certification from the Dance Notation Bureau. Dr. Kosstrin is a past recipient of the Samuel M. Melton Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies.

In addition to her work with the Melton Center and Department of Dance, Dr. Kosstrin is affiliate faculty with the Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She joined the Ohio State faculty in 2014, and previously taught at Reed College, Wittenberg University, and Ohio University Pickerington Center.