Mark Franko, internationally recognized dancer, choreographer and dance scholar; Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at Boyer College of Music and Dance; and director of the Institute of Dance Scholarship, has been elected to the British Academy as an international fellow, one of the highest honors in the humanities.

“It’s the pinnacle of one’s career,” said Franko. “To be recognized internationally in this way is confirming of the value of my work over the years in dance and performance scholarship and also makes a statement about the importance of the field itself.”  

Franko’s election as one of the British Academy’s international fellows is a lifelong, invitation-only distinction that enters him into an elite cohort of academics. While the United Kingdom’s national academy is dedicated to advancing public understanding of humanistic knowledge and issues in higher education primarily in the U.K., they also select a group of international scholars with “high international standing” to serve as international fellows. These fellows are also concerned with the state of the humanities, arts and social science globally, all of which are under threat. 

As part of the global network of international fellows, Franko will help shape the future of humanistic scholarship through discussion, international engagement and policy advocacy. “It’s a way of bringing people together around shared intellectual interests. That resonates with a lot of what I’ve already been doing,” Franko said. “The idea is to work through shared problems and to bring people together in the public interest to ask what the humanities, arts and social sciences contribute to our lives.” 

As a professional dancer and scholar of French literature, Franko’s dedication to the study of dance bridges the arts and the humanities through both practice and theory. His scholarship is centered on Baroque dance and modern/postmodern dance in relation to critical theory and cultural history, with an emphasis on politics, psychoanalysis and performance theory. Earlier in his career, he was a professional dancer and created his own dance company, NovAntiqua, in 1985, and his choreography has been performed at the Lincoln Center, the Getty Center and other renowned institutions around the world. He is the author of nine books, including Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, which is highly cited and regarded as a seminal text in dance studies. His recent book, Text as Dance: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque examines how societal power structures were represented in French Baroque court ballet.   

A recent feature about Franko in tanz, the international, German-language dance publication, described Franko’s broad impact on dance scholarship: “The fact that valuable criticism can be formulated with and about dance, and that corresponding contributions also have an impact on broader humanities, is an achievement of recent decades, to which Franko played a key role.” 

This recognition is the latest in a career filled with accolades. In 2020, while at Temple University, Franko received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to complete The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: French Interwar Ballet and the German Occupation, a study of French dance and politics in the early to mid-20th century, and in 2011, he received the Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award from the Congress on Research in Dance. His research has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Foundation, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, among others.  

In addition to his scholastic work, Franko has been an advocate for interdisciplinary study at Temple University. He is the creator and curator of Boyer and the Dance Department’s Dance Studies Colloquium, which invites artists and scholars from outside the university to share their research or creative projects with the campus community. In November, the colloquium will welcome William Forsythe, one of the world’s most eminent dancers and choreographers, for a conversation with Franko. Franko also heads an initiative to produce interdisciplinary talks between artists and scholars from both Temple and beyond on campus called AIR (Arts Interdisciplinary Research).  

For Franko, the induction into the British Academy as an international fellow is a chance to reflect.  

“This recognition is about what we do as scholars and artists and how that contributes to society. It’s a reminder that the humanities, arts and social sciences still matter,” he said.