See Recent Dissertation Abstracts for information on the expansive range of scholarship topics emanating from students in IPTD.

For information on the exciting books published by IPTD alumni authors, see our Recent IPTD Alumni Books.

Class of 2024

Rebekah Bryer

Janine Chow

Keary Watts is a Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow this year at Northwestern for the “On Decolonizing Theatre” seminar.

Class of 2023

Jessica Friedman has accepted a Lecturer position at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she will redevelop the large lecture course introducing students to dance studies and dance history.

Hayana Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at The Ohio State University.

Matthew Randle-Bent is the Associate Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Chelsea Taylor has recently begun a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Skidmore College in the Religious Studies department.

Class of 2022

Laura Ferdinand continues in her position as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Searle Center at Northwestern.

Dwayne Mann is a Theatre Manager at the Gershwin Theatre (currently: Wicked) and COO at HudsonMann, LLC (upcoming: The Wiz/B’way, Spring 2024).

Alicia Hernandez Grande is an Instructional Designer II at Concordia University Chicago.

Weston Twardowski is the program manager of the Diluvial Houston Initiative (an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded program jointly housed in Rice University’s Humanities Research Center and Center for Environmental Studies) and a lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies and Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts. As program manager, Weston leads environmental arts engagement programs on campus and builds partnerships with local environmental justice organizations in the Greater Houston Region. In addition to recent articles published in TDR: The Drama Review and Performance Research, he is working on his first monograph, focusing on the role of post-catastrophe performance in urban adaptation.

Class of 2021

Rachel Merrill Moss is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater at Colgate University. She has held a 2018-19 Fulbright fellowship and was awarded the 2022 IFTR New Scholars’ Prize. Rachel is co-editor with Debra Caplan on the forthcoming collection, The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play that Possessed the World (University of Michigan Press, Fall 2023), and her article “Skrzypek as Synecdoche: Fiddler on the Roof in Poland” can be found in the June 2023 issue of Theatre Journal. Rachel previously taught in the School of Theatre at Boston University.

Skye Strauss is a Visiting Lecturer at Baylor University where she is teaching a variety of courses including hybrid theory and practice classes in Puppetry and Design Theory, both based on her research.  She currently has performance reviews in press with Performing Arts Journal and Howl Round.

Maria De Simone is the 2022–24 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for the “Scholarship Across Boundaries” Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the Associate Editor (with Dassia Posner and Kevin Bartig) and Translator of Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev (Indiana University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 ASTR Translation Prize and Honorable Mentions for Best Edited Collection from ATHE and TaPRA. In 2021–22, Maria taught theatre history, performance studies, and gender/sexuality studies courses at Brown University, Tufts University, and Emerson College.

Class of 2020

Eleanor Russell is a Lecturer in Art History at Texas State University.

C. Tova Markenson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität Berlin. She recently received the Edna Aizenberg Research Award from the Latin American Jewish Studies Association to support her book project on performances of gender, sexuality, and Jewish migration.

Class of 2019

Lisa Kelly is the Assistant Director for Graduate Student Success & Development at the University of Iowa. She also leads the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching & Learning (CIRTL) program at the university.

Grace Kessler McMunn completed her postdoctoral position in the Department of Jewish Studies at Duke University in August 2020. She began a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Theater at Columbia College Chicago in the fall of 2020.

Amy Swanson is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Colgate University. Her writing may be found in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies and Critical African Studies. Her current book project examines contemporary dance in Senegal, transnational circulation, and gender and sexuality.

Class of 2018

Jessica Hinds-Bond is a freelance scholarly editor and indexer. She is also the Russian Federation regional managing editor for TheTheatreTimes.com.

Bethany Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the Latinx, Indigenous, and the America’s Focus Group Conference Planner in ATHE. She had a co-authored piece published, and has a forthcoming article this summer. Bethany received the UROP Outstanding Research Mentor award this spring (undergraduate research mentorship program award). She is the Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities on the campus of UM during 20-21 and will be on leave.

Elizabeth Bradley Hunter is an Assistant Professor in Drama and Director of the Fabula(b) Theatre + New Media Lab in the Performing Arts Department at Washington University in St. Louis.  Her article “Enactive Spectatorship, Critical Making, and Dramaturgical Analysis: Building Something Wicked, the Macbeth Video Game” was published in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Jim Lasko is currently creating Guild Row, a new kind of social club for the artisinally curious. Guild Row is built around the concept that making things together creates vibrant, diverse and resilient communities. This concept was modeled in part on the model of theater productions, where a common goal coordinates many hands and minds to create the deep experience of community.

Elliot Gordon Mercer is an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow and  Instructor in the Department of English and TAPS at the University of Chicago. His current book project examines the work of postmodern choreographers Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Laura Dean. Mercer is an authorized transmitter of Yvonne Rainer’s iconic minimalist dance work Trio A (1966). As a dance notator, Mercer holds a Labanotation Teaching Certification from the Ohio State University and a Certificate in Benesh Movement Notation from the Royal Academy of Dance.

Class of 2017

Lauren Beck is a Lecturer at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts Department. Her research connects theatre studies, sound studies, and digital media studies with a focus on participatory audiences.

Dawn Tracey Brandes is an Assistant Professor in the Fountain School of Performing Arts at Dalhousie University and the Executive Director of Halifax Humanities, a non-profit committed to providing free humanities education to adults living on low incomes in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  Her research focuses on contemporary puppetry and the performance of life.

Lizzie Leopold is Executive Director of the Dance Studies Association and a Lecturer at the University of Chicago, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Her research focuses on the political economy of dance production, with a specific focus on modes/methods of choreographic valuation. She is currently working on a co-edited anthology of Chicago dance histories, Dancing on the Third Coast, with Susan Manning. Leopold is also the director/choreographer of the Leopold Group, a small Chicago-based modern dance company.

Ira S. Murfin is a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow appointed to the Chicago Humanities Festival as Program Manager for Neighborhood Partnerships. His research investigates the relationship between media, cultural institutions, and disciplinary categories in late 20th-century artistic vanguards — the project he is currently developing looks at the lives and impact of independent performing arts institutions in Chicago during the 1980s and ’90s. His creative practice — including his ongoing project An Interview — focuses on extemporaneous talk as a performance material. He is also an audience enrichment specialist and regularly leads conversations, gives talks, and writes contextual material for Chicago performing arts presenting institutions, including Chicago Shakespeare Theater, where he in his seventh season as a PreAmble Scholar. More at: IraSMurfin.com.

Tara Rodman is an Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. She is the recipient of an NEH-JUSFC fellowship to support her book project, Fantasies of Belonging, on the modern dancer Ito Michio.

Class of 2016

Christine Simonian Bean is the Associate Director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Theatre Program at the University of Michigan. She designs and facilitates experiences for instructors on inclusive and equitable teaching practices.

Megan E. Geigner is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Cook Family Writing Program at Northwestern University. Her research explores civic performance as a method of shaping immigrant discourse and hyphenated identities in early twentieth-century US history. She is the co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages: A Century of Theater and Performance (Northwestern University Press, 2021), and her chapter tells the history of ethnic theatre’s influence on the early years of the Goodman theatre.

Aileen Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Her current book project explores the contribution of theatre and magic performance to the development of science as a discipline in the nineteenth century.

Class of 2015

Jordana Cox is an Assistant Professor of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo.  Her current book project is called Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York, 1935-9.

Carla Della Gatta is a Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She received the J Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize in 2016 from the Shakespeare Association of America for the best dissertation on a Shakespeare theme. She is the author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2023) and co-editor with Trevor Boffone of Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edinburgh, 2021).

Laura A. Lodewyck is an Associate Professor of Theatre at North Central College in Naperville, IL, where she heads the Student Directed Series. Her research focuses on the transformative power of theatre, particularly during times of war, and she is a scholar with the Latinx Theatre Commons’ El Fuego initiative, whose mission is to produce and document new Latinx work. With an MFA in Acting Performance from Roosevelt University, she also performs and directs in the Chicago area.

Class of 2014

David Calder is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre & Performance Studies in the Department of Drama at the University of Manchester (UK). His first book, Street Theatre and the Production of Postindustrial Space: Working Memories (Manchester University Press, 2019), examines the aesthetic, economic, and historiographic work of contemporary French street theater companies.

Gina DiSalvo is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first monograph, The Renaissance of the Saints After Reform (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines the English saint play during and after the Middle Ages.

Class of 2013

Sara Armstrong has over twenty years of experience as an actor, director, dramaturg, arts administrator, and educator across professional, university, and community contexts. She has led the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching’s theatre program at the University of Michigan since 2012, establishing strategic priorities for the company that align with the needs of a range of higher education communities and the Players’s commitments to advancing social justice and equity in academic spaces.

John Carnwath is a consultant with WolfBrown where his work primarily focuses on arts funding, cultural policy, and related issues. He is a contributing Editor for the arts research blog Createquity.

Keith Byron Kirk is an Assistant Professor of Theatre in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Theatre. He is the author of the plays As Reaper in Summer Grain, Stone. Baby. Solitaire…, Goodbye Sweetwater, and a new translation and adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre with Alícia Hernàndez Grande. Also as a professional actor, he performed in the Broadway and Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s productions of Grapes of Wrath.

Class of 2012

Christine Scippa Bhasin is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Theatre & History at The College of William & Mary. Her research examines the theatrical performances of cloistered women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venetian convents.

La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern UP 2020) and In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Northwestern UP 2018). She is the recipient of the 2016 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award and serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference.

Katherine Zien is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at McGill University. Her 2017 book, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone, investigates performances and legal constructions of imperialism, race, and national sovereignty in the Panama Canal Zone during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Zien’s current project, which explores militarization and performance in Latin America’s Cold War, is generously funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant.

Class of 2011

Adrian Curtin is an Associate Professor in the Drama Department of the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave 2014, winner of the 2015 TaPRA Early Career Research Prize) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019). He is co-founder and co-convener of the Sound, Voice, & Music TaPRA working group and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research network Representing ‘Classical Music’ in the Twenty-First Century.

Nathan Hedman is an Associate Professor of English and Theatre at High Point University.  His research interests include performance and philosophy, secularity, religion, Enlightenment and Romantic Theatres, and Aesthetic Theory.

Emily Sahakian is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Coordinator of Theatre at the University of Georgia, where she has a joint appointment between Theatre and Film Studies and Romance Languages. She is the author of Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2017).

Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, Theater, and Caribbean Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. Her book The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), examines “Chitlin Circuit” theatrical productions and the reception practices of African American spectators.

Class of 2010

Oona Hatton is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Graduate Coordinator for the Communication Studies department at San José State University. She has recently published articles in Research in Drama Education and PUBLIC: Imagining America. Her play, See You in My Dreams, adapted from the letters, poetry, and artwork of solitary survivor Jack L. Morris, premiered at SJSU’s Hammer Theatre in Spring 2019. Dr. Hatton was the 2020 recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award from SJSU’s College of Social Sciences.

Jesse Njus is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Jesse’s award-winning article, “The Politics of Mysticism: Elisabeth of Spalbeek in Context” appeared in Church History. She has also published articles in Theatre Journal and Fifteenth-Century Studies and in the collection Food and Theatre on the World Stage, edited by Dorothy Chansky and Ann Folino White (Routledge, 2015).

Sam O’Connell is the Department Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Worcester State University. Most recently, he published “The Wiz and the African Diaspora Musical: Rethinking the Research Questions in Black Musical Historiography” in Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2018), edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Reneé Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz.

Jonathan Foley Sherman is a Senior Innovations Specialist at WellSpan Health. He is the author of A Strange Proximity: Stage Presence, Failure, and the Ethics of Attentions (Routledge, 2016) and co-editor, with Maaike Bleeker and Eirini Nedelkopou, of Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions ad Transformations (Routledge, 2015).

Daniel T. Smith, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at Michigan State University. He is a professional dramaturg and theatre historian with research interests in seventeenth- and eighteenth century French theatre. His work in translation for the stage has been published by The Mercurian and Broadway Play Publishing. He serves as an officer in the Dramaturgy Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and as editor of the journal Theatre/Practice.

Class of 2008

Christina S. McMahon is an Associate Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Re-Casting Transnationalism through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Stefka Mihaylova is an Associate Professor of Drama at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on gender and racial aspects of spectatorship in contemporary American and British feminist theatre. She is co-editor with Tracy C. Davis of Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of American’s Most Mutable Book (University of Michigan Press, 2018) and author of Viewers in Distress: Race, Gender, Religion and Avant-Garde Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Class of 2007

Jacob Juntunen is an Associate Professor of Playwrighting and Head of the MFA Playwrighting and PhD programs in the Department of Theater at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also a playwright with frequent Chicago productions.

Anne Pulju is the Head of Upper School English and is an English Teacher at the Sandy Spring Friends School.

Karima Robinson is a theatre artist, playwright, director, and educator with over ten years of experience directing student-devised plays and teaching Theatre History, Africana Studies, Performance Studies, and Playwriting at SUNY Purchase, Vassar College, and Northwestern University.  She leads theatre workshops in New York and Connecticut for a range of youth and adult participants.

Ann Folino White is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and Directing and Head of Theatre Studies at Michigan State University. She is editor of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas. She is contributing co-editor of Food & Theatre on the World Stage (Routledge, 2015). Her book Plowed Under: Food Policy Protests and Performance in New Deal America (Indiana University Press, 2015) was awarded the 2015 Working Class Studies Association CLR James Book Award.

Class of 2006

Kimberly Tony Korol-Evans is an independent scholar and performer. She is the author of Renaissance Festivals: Merrying the Past and Present (McFarland & Co. 2009).

Shelly Scott-Harmon is a Lecturer in Business Communications at Kelley School of Business.

Rebecca Rossen is an Associate Professor of Performance as Public Practice in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Division Head of Performance Studies and Pedagogy. She is the author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford UP, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize from the Congress on Research in Dance.

Class of 2005

Suk-Young Kim is Professor of Theatre & Dance at UCLA where she also directs the Center for Performance Studies. She is the author of K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Stanford University Press, 2018), Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (U. Michigan Press, 2010), DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (Columbia UP, 2014), and, with Yong Kim, Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor(Columbia UP, 2009). Her research has been acknowledged by the International Federation for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize (2004), Association for Asian Studies James Palais Book Prize (2013), Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Prize (2015), and ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship (2014-15) among others.

Sheila Moeschen is the Senior Editor for I AM THAT GIRL, an organization that empowers young women through positive media. She is the author of Acts of Conspicuous Compassion: Performance Culture and American Charity Practices (University of Michigan Press, 2013).

Melinda Wilson Ramey is the Associate Dean, Students and Personnel at California State University, Sacramento.

Praise Zenenga is an Associate Professor in the Africana Studies Program and the Director of the Africana Studies Program at the University of Arizona.

Class of 2004

Lauren McConnell is an Associate Professor of Theatre Interpretation and Dance at Central Michigan University.

Emily E. Roxworthy is a Dean and Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts, as well as Artistic Director of Workplace Interactive Theatre. She is the author of The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity in World War II (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). She is the co-director of the digital project Drama in the Delta, a 3D role-playing video game that reconstructs interracial and intercultural performances staged at two Japanese internment camps during WWII. She is also the author of The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas (Routledge, 2020).

Class of 2003

Lesley M. Delmenico is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance at Grinnell College. She directs and teaches acting and performance studies as well as theatre history, postcolonial and postwar British drama. Her research continues in intercultural and community-based performance; she is currently exploring performances of reconciliation (both theatrical and in institutions like tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions).

Class of 2002

Aaron D. Anderson is a Professor and Graduate Program Director of the Department of Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the Associate Chair and Head of Undergraduate Studies for the Theatre Department, Founding Director of the Standardized Patient Program in the School of Medicine, and Instructor for the Executive MBA program in the School of Business.

Anthea Kraut is a Professor of the Department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. Her first book, Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston (U of Minnesota P, 2008) received a Special Citation from the Society of Dance History Scholars’ de la Torre Bueno Prize® for distinguished book of dance scholarship. Her second book, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford UP, 2015) won the ATHE 2016 Outstanding Book Award, the Congress on Research in Dance’s Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, the 2016 Biennial Sally Banes Publication Award from ASTR, and Honorable Mention for ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.

Deborah Paredez is an Associate Professor in Writing and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is the author of the poetry collection This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002) and the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke, 2009).

Class of 2001

Leslie Goddard is an actress, playwright, author, and lecturer who runs her own public speaking and historical interpretation business. She is the author of Remembering Marshall Field’s (Arcadia Publishing 2011) and Chicago’s Sweet Candy History (Arcadia Publishing 2012).

Class of 2000

Lin Classon is an SVP of Global Product Management at the Kognitiv Corporation.

Kimberly Dixon is a poet. She has published in journals including The Drunken Boat, Torch, Versal, Reverie, and the anthology Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! (GirlChild Press 2008). Her play “The Gizzard of Brownsville” was a finalist in the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow.

Marta Effinger-Crichlow is a Ptofessor of African American Studies and Associate Professor of Theatre and Literature at New York City College of Technology. She is the author of Staging Migrations Toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones (Colorado UP, 2014). Her plays include Union Station, The Kitchen is Closed Startin’ Sunday, Whispers Want to Holler, and You Dig.

Michael McKinnie is a Professor of Theatre at Queen Mary University. He is the author of City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (University of Toronto Press 2007) and editor of Space and the Geographies of Theatre (Playwrights Canada Press 2007).

Class of 1999

Abigail Feder-Kane is the Director of Development and External Relations at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.

Beth Friedman-Romell is the Cantor and spiritual leader of Knesseth Israel Temple in Wooster, Ohio.

Monica Maillet is a Biomedical Ethicist.

Loren Mayor is the Chief Operating Officer of the World Wildlife Fund.

Class of 1998

Susan Applebaum is an Instructor of Theatre at Loyola University Chicago, and a member of the faculty at Piven Theatre Workshop. She is the author, with Joyce Piven, of In the Studio with Joyce Piven: Theatre Games, Story Theatre and Text Work for Actors (Methuen Drama 2012).

Nadine George-Graves is a Professor of Theatre at the Ohio State University. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900-1940 (St. Martin’s, 2000), and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working It Out (Wisconsin UP, 2010).

Class of 1996

Catherine Cole is a Professor of Drama & Divisional Dean of the Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Indiana UP 2010) and Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (Indiana UP 2001). She co-edited Africa After Gender? (Indiana UP 2007) with Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan F. Miescher.

David A. Schlossman is the author of Actors and Activists: Performance, Politics, and Exchange Among Social Worlds (Routledge 2002).

Mary Trotter is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the Director of UW-Madison’s Celtic Studies Program. She is the author of Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse University Press 2001) and Modern Irish Theatre (Cultural History of Literature Series, Polity Press 2008).

Class of 1995

Peter Senkbeil is the Provost and Executive Vice President at Concordia University Irvine, where he is also a Professor of Theatre. He previously served as Associate Provost at Concordia for ten years and ran the university’s theatre department for fourteen years. Recent acting credits include Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It at Looseleaf Theatre and The Hiding Place and Shadowlands at the American Coast Theatre Company, all in Orange County, California.

Class of 1994

Rev. Stephen Campbell, S.J. was an Associate Professor of Theater and Drama and chair of the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Spring Hill College.

Penelope Farfan is a Professor of Drama at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Performing Queer Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2017), Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge UP, 2004/2007) and co-editor with Lesley Ferris of Contemporary Women Playwrights: Into the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2013).

Assunta Bartolomucci Kent is an Associate Professor of Theater at the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics (Greenwood Press, 1996).

Class of 1993

David Carlyon has written two award-winning books, Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of (Public Affairs, 2001), and The Education of a Circus Clown: Mentors, Audiences, Mistakes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). An adjunct professor at Iona College, he continues his scholarship, including a Theatre Survey article, “From the Broadway Tabernacle to the Gettysburg Battlefield: Did Edwin Forrest Influence Abraham Lincoln?” (2015). His play Polonius was chosen for a staged reading at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. A former Ringling / Barnum clown, he is a Scholar Advisor for the Circus Arts Program of the 2017 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Thomas A. King is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, where he also heads the interdisciplinary minor in Sexuality and Queer Studies. He is the author of The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 1: The English Phallus (U Wisconsin Press, 2004) and The Gendering of Men 1660-1750, vol. 2: Queer Articulations (U of Wisconsin Press, 2007).

Class of 1991

Geoffrey Edwards is an award-winning author and stage director who has served as artistic director of the Marquee Theatre Company and resident stage director for the DuPage Opera Theatre. He has served on academic faculties in both the United States and Europe. A popular speaker and lecturer for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, he has also written extensively about music and opera. His books, co-authored with Metropolitan Opera baritone Ryan Edwards, include The Verdi Baritone, as well as Verdi and Puccini Heroines and A.K.A. Doc: The Oral History of a New Orleans Street Musician.

Scott Fosdick is an Emeritus Faculty in the School of Journalism & Mass Communications at San Jose State University, he was a Professor and Graduate Coordinator.

Class of 1989

Deanna Jent is a Professor of Theatre at Fontbonne University and Artistic Director of Mustard Seed Theatre in St. Louis. Her play Falling was nominated for a 2013 Drama Desk Award.

Cindy Lutenbacher is a Professor of English at Morehouse College.

Class of 1988

Judy Lee Oliva is a playwright. She is the author of David Hare: Theatricalizing Politics (Umi Research Press, 1990) and New Theatre Vistas: Modern Movements in International Theatre (Routledge, 1995).

Class of 1987

Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar and the former Librarian for Performing Arts, Media, and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the co-editor, with Susan Haedicke, of Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2001).

Last updated November 2023
Is something or someone missing? Please send updates to David Kleineick (david.kleineick@northwestern.edu).