Who's Involved?

Sarah Bay-Cheng

is the Dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). Her research focuses on the intersections among performance and media including histories of cinema, social media, and computer technology in contemporary performance. Book publications include: Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance (2010). She also edits the book series Avant-Gardes in Performance for Palgrave and serves on multiple editorial and advisory boards. She is a co-host for On Tap, a Theatre and Performance Studies podcast.

Michael Y. Bennett

is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; he will also be a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, where he will be a Visiting Fellow in 2021. The author or editor of eleven books, Bennett is best known for his work on absurd drama, on the philosophy of theatre, on Edward Albee, and on Oscar Wilde.

Henry Bial

is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching specialties include performance theory, religious performance, Jewish popular culture, and theatre historiography. He is the author of Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (2015) and Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005). In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Dr. Bial has worked in a variety of capacities — director, performer, designer, playwright, dramaturg, and lighting operator — in university and professional theatres in New York, Kansas City, Boston, Minneapolis, and Albuquerque.

Kate Bredeson

is a theater historian, a director, and a dramaturg. She researches and writes about 20th and 21st century experimental theater, with a particular focus on the transformative potentials of theater in the 1960s and today. Publications include: Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 (Northwestern, 2018) and A Lifetime of Resistance: the Diaries of Judith Malina 1947-2015 (forthcoming). Fellowships and awards include Fulbright, NEH, Beinecke, NYPL, Mellon, and residencies at Bellagio, Dora Maar, and the Camargo Foundation. Bredeson is Associate Professor of Theatre at Reed College.

Chase Bringardner

is  Chair and Professor in the Department of Theatre at Auburn University. His work specializes in the study of popular entertainments (such as medicine shows and musical theatre), regional identity construction, and intersections of race, gender, and class in popular performance forms. His recent publications include a chapter in The Oxford Companion to the Musical (2019) on Region, Politics, and Identity in musical theatre as well as a chapter on Medicine Shows and the performance of domestic space in the anthology Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual, and Images of Home (2019). He also serves the president-elect for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). Additionally, he has directed many productions at Auburn and beyond including The Belle's Stratagem, Big Fish, Assassins, 9 to 5, Vinegar Tom, Cabaret, and  Hair. 

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Julie Burelle

is a Professor and Head of the PhD program in Theatre at University of California, San Diego. Originally from Quebec, Canada, Julie has studied and taught theatre on both coasts of Canada and the United States. Julie's research is invested in a decolonizing project and is in conversation with the fields of Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Indigenous studies among others. Her first book, Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec (2019) focuses on how questions of Indigenous sovereignty, cultural identity, and nationhood are negotiated through performances in the particular context of Quebec, a province whose national aspirations have often occupied center stage.

Charlotte Canning

is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor in Drama at the University of Texas, Austin. Canning is also the director of the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism. She is the author of On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (2015), The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (2005), and Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience (1996). She co-edited with Thomas Postlewait Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2010). Currently, she is writing a history of theatre in Texas for UT Press and co-editing an anthology of global feminist performance for Routledge Press.

Marla Carlson

is a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia, where she serves as Graduate Coordinator and head of the PhD program in Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research focuses on spectator response to bodies in performance, including the performance of physical suffering, non-human animals, and autism spectrum disorders. She also works on medieval theatre and cultural studies, performance and body art, affect theory, and feminist theory and performance. Marla currently serves as President of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Meredith Conti

is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture in the United States and Britain. Book publications include: Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2018) and a co-edited essay collection Theatre and the Macabre (forthcoming). She is the Book Review Editor of Theatre Annual and a recent recipient of fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and the American Society for Theatre Research.

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Tracy C. Davis

is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University, and specializes in 19C British theatre history; historiography; economics and business history of theatre; performance theory; gender and theatre; research methodology; museum studies; and Cold War studies. She has edited numerous collections, the most recent of which are The Routledge Handbook to Theatre and Performance Historiography (forthcoming, co-edited with Peter Marx) and Uncle Tom's Cabins: The Transnational History of America's Most Mutable Book (2018, co-edited with Stefka Mihaylova). Her current book project is a transnational study of how abolition, universal suffrage, free trade, and anti-genocide were advocated in the 19C by extrapolating principles of performance drawn from drama, the church, law, parliament, and public meetings. She is editor of the monograph series Cambridge Studies in Theatre and Performance Theory and co-editor of the monograph series Transnational Theatre Histories (Palgrave).

Aparna Dhardwhaker

Bio forthcoming.

Peter Eckersall

teaches at the Graduate Center, CUNY and is a Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne. His research interests include Japanese performance, dramaturgy and theatre and politics. Publications include: Machine Made Silence (ed. with Kristof van Baarle, 2020), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics (ed. with Helena Grehan, 2019), New Media Dramaturgy (co-authored with Helena Grehan and Ed Scheer, 2017) and Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan (2013).  He was co-founder/dramaturg of Not Yet It’s Difficult.  Recent dramaturgy includes: Everything Starts from a Dot (Sachiyo Takahashi, LaMama), Phantom Sun/Northern Drift (Alexis Destoop, Beursschouwburg, Riga Biennial).

Christin Essin

is an Associate Professor of Theatre History at Vanderbilt University. Her book, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics (2012), won a Golden Pen award from the United States Institute for Theatre Technology; it examines the cultural roles played by theatre designers during the modern development of their profession. Her current book project is a cultural history of backstage labor, with particular emphasis on the labor politics and unions operating in New York City’s jurisdictions.

John Fletcher

is the Billy J. Harbin Associate Professor of Theatre at Louisiana State University. He studies social change performance, evangelical Christianity, and online disinformation/misinformation. His work appears in journals such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Performance Matters as well as in anthologies such as Theatre, Performance, and Change (Palgrave 2018), Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (Palgrave 2017), and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (Michigan 2010). His monograph Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age was published in 2013 by Michigan. He serves as the co-editor of Theatre Topics. Current research projects involve investigating the endpoints of activist performance and theorizing irony/mendacity in online performance.

 

La Donna L. Forsgren

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on African American theatre and performance, dramaturgy, and the Black liberation struggle. Forsgren’s work has appeared in journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, and Continuum. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works of Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance is forthcoming this fall. Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. 

Donatella Galella

is Associate Professor of Theatre History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside. Galella researches the racial politics and economic dynamics of contemporary U.S. popular performance. She is the author of America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (2019). Her second book project investigates how yellowface persists in twenty-first century musical productions, and how Asian Americans have responded with their art, activism, and affect. Galella has published articles and chapters in venues including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Reframing the Musical, and Casting a Movement.

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R. Darren Gobert

is William and Sue Gross Professor of Theater Studies and of English at Duke University. His publications include The Theatre of Caryl Churchill (Bloomsbury) and The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford UP), which won best book prizes from both the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the American Society for Theatre Research. From 2015 to 2020, he was editor of the quarterly Modern Drama.

Jennifer Goodlander

is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature where she teaches classes on Indonesian and global theatre, literature, and other arts. She is also an active affiliate faculty member in Theatre and Drama, Folklore, and Museum Studies. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books:

Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Jennifer is also the current President for the Association of Asian Performance.

Michelle Granshaw

is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include U.S. and Irish theatre and popular entertainment, diaspora and global performance histories, performance and the working class, and historiography. She is the author of Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (2019). Her essays have appeared in Theatre Survey, Popular Entertainment Studies, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Theatre Topics, New England Theatre Journal, and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Her awards and grants include the ATDS Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award, MATC Robert A. Schanke Research Award, and University of Notre Dame Cushwa Center Hibernian Research Award, among others. She is working on two new projects. One focuses on the relationship between transatlantic Irish popular performance and the emergence of modern urban sectarian violence in Belfast. The second is a narrative history of the fight for the right to amusement and black civil rights after the Civil War.

Barbara Wallace Grossman

is a Professor of Theatre at Tufts University. She is a theatre historian, voice specialist, director, and author with strong interests as a scholar and practitioner in contemporary musical theatre, Holocaust- and genocide-related theatre and film, voice and speech, directing, and arts advocacy. A presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts (1994-1999) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Council (2000-2005), she was Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Cultural Council from 2007-2019. She currently serves on the American Repertory Theater’s Board of Advisors, MassCreative’s Board of Directors, and the Anti-Defamation League’s New England Regional Board.

Brian Herrera

is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Princeton University. His research examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. He is author of The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound, 2015). His book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and received an Honorable Mention for the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. With Stephanie Batiste and Robin Bernstein, Brian serves as co-editor of “Performances and American Cultures” series at NYU Press.

DJ Hopkins

Bio forthcoming.

Amy E. Hughes

is an Associate Professor and head of the Bachelor of Theatre Arts (BTA) program in the Department of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan. Her expertise and interests include nineteenth-century U.S. theatre, material and visual culture, disability studies, animal studies, digital humanities, documentary editing, and collaborative learning. Publications include: Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (2012), which received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research; and A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor (2018), edited in collaboration with Naomi J. Stubbs. 

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Megan Sanborn Jones

is a Professor in Theatre Arts Studies at Brigham Young University. Her first book, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama from Routledge Press won the Mormon History Association Smith-Pettit Best First Book Award (2010) and her second book, Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After Our Dead from the University of Michigan Press was published in October 2018. Jones previously served as the book review editor of Theater Topics and the performance review editor of BYU Studies. She is currently on the editorial boards of Mormon Studies Review and Ecumenica.

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