Conquergood Dies at 55

Fall 2005, Volume 27, Number 1

Dwight Conquergood

Dwight Conquergood, a scholar whose ethnographic research took him to refugee camps in Thailand and the Gaza Strip and to immigrant and gang-infested Chicago neighborhoods, died on November 13, 2004 after a long battle with colon cancer.

Conquergood, 55, was an associate professor of performance studies, a department he chaired for six years. As an IPR faculty member from 1985 to 1999, he began his pioneering research into street-gang culture.

Shortly after joining the IPR faculty, Conquergood signed on as a co-investigator of the Albany Park project, part of a seven-city study funded by the Ford Foundation. The project sought to understand the changing relationships among new immigrants and established residents in a multicultural neighborhood in Chicago.

Before taking on the study, IPR’s then-director Margaret T. Gordon asked several faculty what each might do to move the project ahead. “One said he’d look up relevant literature,” she recalled. “Another agreed to call some contacts; a third would phone a teacher he knew in an Albany Park school. Dwight said he would move into the neighborhood for a couple of years!”

The “Big Red” tenement Conquergood selected was located in an area known as “Little Beirut,” rampant with gangs, graffiti, and civil disorder. He became an active member of the community, befriending and tutoring gang members while he studied their culture and daily life. This research became an IPR monograph, “Life in Big Red: Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic Tenement,” later published in Group Communication in Context (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994).

Conquergood also produced several award-winning documentaries, including one on Laotian refugees in Chicago, which received the Silver Plaque Award at the Chicago International Film Festival.

He was selected as a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and was named Illinois professor of the year in 1993 by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Conquergood served six years as director of Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts. After earning his Ph.D. in performance studies at Northwestern, he joined its faculty in 1978.