I
study the art of activism. I look at the ways political actors
use performance in experiments for social justice (e.g., Civil Rights sit-ins and AIDS die-ins) and the ways stage
actors use the theater as a laboratory for creating new worlds, reimagining notions of
community, citizenship, power, and justice.
I am an associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University, where I am a core member of the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies Program, and an affiliate faculty member of both Visual Studies and American Studies.
In 2016, I was named a Stephen H. Weiss Junior Fellow, Cornell's
highest teaching honor for a recently tenured faculty member.
As an advocate for public humanities,
for scholarship that engages society (not simply other academics), my
work takes many forms, from a collaboration with climate scientists
that explores the human impact of global warming on the Finger Lakes to
the staging of "patriot acts" (political performances on national
holidays) with the Bad (Hombres) and Nasty (Women) Collective.
In my research I attempt to articulate, through close
readings of dramatic literature and live performances, archival
research, and theoretical reflection, a series of questions concerning
bodies and the modes of attachment that bind them into various forms of
publics and counterpublics. Across a variety of genres and performative
contexts, I examine the forces that mobilize and marshal individuals
into constituencies and communities, audiences and electorates. Of
particular interest to me are criminal intimacies and fugitive
societies: the kinds of alliances that are branded as non-normative
(i.e., alternative, aberrant, queer), but which offer productive ways
to illuminate, explicate, and trouble ideas about emotions, politics,
and art. To make sense of this generative relationship among the
affective, the queer, and the performative, I take as my focus
illegitimate theatrical forms (melodrama, camp) and bastardized modes
of expression (agit-prop, performance art) whose illicit status stems,
in part, from their excessive sentimentality; illegal performances that
provoke moral outrage (burlesque, prostitution, homosexual acts);
unlawful assemblages by political extremists (terrorist cells, riots);
speech acts (manifestos, declarations, coming out narratives); and
militant modes of protest (guerrilla theater, zap actions).
My first book, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure
(University of Michigan Press's Triangulation Series, 2012), received
the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book
Award, an Honorable Mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for
Outstanding Book in Theatre History from the American Society for
Theatre Research (ASTR), and was named a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. I
have published widely in journals and anthologies on dramatic
literature and performance studies, feminist and queer theory, prison
theater, affect theory, and academic labor. My writing is also
published in a variety of maninstream media outlets, including Time and Huffington Post.
I co-founded the "Performance Encounters" series at
Cornell, which is dedicated to supporting socially engaged artists
whose work expands the parameters of theatrical forms and traditions.
Featured guests include filmmaker and counter-culture icon John Waters, Pulitzer Prize winner Paula Vogel, Tony Award recipient Lisa Kron, GLAAD award winner Marga Gomez, NEA Four member Tim Miller, and many more.
An active member of numerous professional organizations, I have served as President of the Women and Theatre Program, Drama Division Delegate for the MLA, Secretary of ATHE, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). Currently, I serve on the executive board of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation and the Cherry Artspace.