Presenters

Kate Bredeson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Theatre department at Reed College. She has recently published essays in PAJTheaterTDR, and the books Center-Staging the Sixties: Mainstream and Popular Performance in a Turbulent Decade and The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. Kate is at work on two books, Occupying the Stage: Theatre of May ’68, and A Lifetime of Resistance: the Diaries of Judith Malina 1947-2015.  Kate’s dramaturgy work includes collaborations with the Court Theatre, the Guthrie, Yale Repertory Theatre, Hand2Mouth Theatre, Portland Playhouse, and with choreographer Tahni Holt.

Daphne A. Brooks is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005).  Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). She has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture such as “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. She is the editor of The Great Escapes:  The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft (New York:  Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006).

Jennifer Buckley is Assistant Professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Iowa, where she teaches courses in modern and postmodern drama, performance, and print cultures. Her essays have appeared in Modernism/modernityTheatre SurveySHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, and Comparative Drama; another is forthcoming in Theater. She is currently completing her first book, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print.

T.L. Cowan is the 2015-2016 Bicentennial Lecturer of Canadian Studies in the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and Digital Humanities Fellow at Yale University. T.L. is visiting Yale from The New School, where she is Chair of Experimental Pedagogies in the School of Media Studies. T.L. is also co-facilitator of the Feminist Technology Network. T.L.’s recent recent work can be found in ephemera: theory and politics in organization (2014), Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014), Women’s Studies Quarterly (2014), and Ada: Gender, New Media, and Technology (2014) and Queer Dramaturges: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave 2015). T.L.’s first book, entitled Poetry’s Bastard: The Illegitimate Genealogies, Cultures and Politics of Text-Based Performance in Canada is under contract with Wilfrid Laurier UP. She is currently completing two additional books: a monograph entitled Sliding Scale: Transfeminist and Queer Cabaret Methods – Mexico City, Montreal, New York City, and a co-authored book, with Jasmine Rault, entitled Checking In: Transfeminist and Queer Labour in Networked Economies.

Brian Eugenio Herrera is Assistant Professor of Theater at Princeton University. His work, both academic and artistic, examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. He is the author of The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound, 2015) and his first book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Michigan, 2015) was recently awarded the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism. He is presently at work on two new book projects: Starring Miss Virginia Calhoun and Casting – A History, a historical study of the material practices of casting in US popular performance.

Lena M. Hill is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and the coauthor of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 2008).  Her work has appeared in American Literature, American Studies, and African American Review.  She is coeditor of the forthcoming Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights (University of Iowa Press, 2016).

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a pop vocalist, a mimic and a rollicking raconteur. He’s also an accomplished playwright pushing the boundaries of subject matter and form—a fact that has been noted in U.S. and international theatrical circles. A native of Washington, D.C., who now lives in Brooklyn, Jacobs-Jenkins has won numerous accolades ranging from the Princess Grace Award and the Dorothy Streslin Playwriting Fellowship to the Paula Vogel Award, and, most recently, the Windham Campbell Prize. Productions of his plays have made waves at theatres across the country. He is currently a playwright-in-residence at Hunter College.

Kimberly Jannarone is Professor of Theater Arts at UC Santa Cruz, where she holds the Gary D. Licker Memorial Chair. This year, she is Visiting Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama and a Beinecke Fellow at Yale Repertory Theater.  She is the author of Artaud and His Doubles (winner of the Honorable Mention for the Joe Callaway Prize for best book in drama) and editor of Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right (both University of Michigan Press). She directs experimental performance and has co-translated, with Erik Butler, works by contemporary French playwrights.

Suk-Young Kim is Professor of Theater and East Asian Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of Illusive Utopia: Theater, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (2010) and DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border (2014). Currently she is completing a book on the symbiotic rise of the Korean Popular Music (K-pop) and digital media.

Uri McMillan is (newly tenured) Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (2015), which was published with NYU Press. He is a graduate of the American Studies/African American Studies joint PhD program at Yale University, where his dissertation was awarded the Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize for best written work on African-American art. He has held grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Mellon Foundation and has been published in academic journals including GLQ, Women and Performance, SOULS. He has also been published by the Studio Museum of Harlem, and has given talks at several arts institutions, including MoMA/PS1, The Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, LACMA, and the Human Resources Gallery. His talk is part of a new project entitled Sensation, Surface, Form, which queries discourses of sensation, surface aesthetics, and form in the work of performer Grace Jones.

Christine Mok is assistant professor of Drama and Performance in the department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. At UC, she is the Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for the Study of Drama and Playwriting.  She is currently completing her first book project, which uses intermediality and theatricality as critical optics to examine the shifting politics and poetics of inauthenticity in contemporary Asian American performance. She has published in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PAJ: A Performing Arts Journal. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University and holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

Madison Moore is a scholar artist based in the Department of English at King’s College London. His work touches the intersections between popular performance, queer studies, music, fashion and visual culture. He is currently working on two book projects: The Theory of the Fabulous Class: Creativity at the Margins, under contract at Yale University Press, and How to Go Clubbing: On the Magic of Saturday Night.

Tavia Nyong’o writes, researches and teaches critical black studies, queer studies, cultural theory, and cultural history. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minnesota, 2009), won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies. Nyong’o has published articles on punk, disco, viral media, the African diaspora, film, and performance art in venues such as Radical History Review, Criticism, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Women Studies Quarterly, The Nation, and n+1. He is the co-editor of Social Text.

Tina Post is a doctoral student in American and African American Studies at Yale. Her scholarly writing has appeared in TDR and IRAA ( International Review of African American Art). She has also published literary work in The Appendix and Stone Canoe. She is currently at work on her dissertation, Deadpan Aesthetics in Black Expressive Culture.

Joseph Roach—theater historian, stage director, and performance studies scholar—is the author of The Player’s Passion:  Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), Cities of the Dead:  Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) and It (2007).  He is the editor (with Janelle Reinelt) of Critical Theory and Performance (2nd edition, revised 2007) and Changing the Subject:  Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (2009).  His publications have been recognized by the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Barnard Hewitt Award in Theatre History, and the Joe E. Calloway Prize for Drama.  Before coming to Yale, he chaired the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of Arts at NYU.  He is the recipient of a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which funds the World Performance Project at Yale. In 2009, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Warwick (UK) and the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship from the Huntington Library.

Daniel Sack is an assistant professor in the department of English and the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He is the author of After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2015). A short volume on Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape is forthcoming this summer from Routledge. He has published chapters, essays, and reviews of contemporary performance in numerous books and journals.

Nick Salvato is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Performing and Media Arts and the recent former Director of LGBT Studies at Cornell University. His articles have appeared in numerous venues, including Critical Inquiry, Criticism, Discourse, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, TDR, Theatre, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. He is also the author of the books Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (Yale UP, 2010), Knots Landing (Wayne State UP, 2015), and, most recently, Obstruction (Duke UP, 2016).

Shane Vogel is associate professor of English and Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University. He is the author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which received Honorable Mention for the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theater Research. He is currently completing a book on black performance and the 1950s calypso craze, for which he has received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship. He has published articles in Signs, Social Text, Theatre JournalWomen & PerformanceCriticismCamera Obscura, and GLQ, among others.

Patricia Ybarra is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico ( University of Michigan, 2009), Co-editor with Lara Nielsen of Neoliberalism and Global Theatres ( Palgrave MacMillan, 2012; paper 2014), and author of Latino/a Theatre in the Times of Neoliberalism, under contract with Northwestern University Press. She has published essays in numerous anthologies, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama and Aztlán. She is the President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a founding member of the Latina/o Theatre Commons.