Classes Taught

In Katie O’Reilly’s peeling (2002), three disabled women perform as the chorus in a post-modern production of The Trojan Women. Alfa, the most seasoned of the three, complains that theater is a tough business for disabled actors because they must compete against nondisabled performers for disabled roles. Casting directors, however, won’t let them read for traditionally nondisabled characters. She wryly observes that “cripping up” (a nondisabled actor performing a disabled role) is the “twenty-first century’s answer to blacking up.” O’Reilly’s models her formulation on blackface minstrelsy and anti-black performance, but “cripping up” would later become just one of many terms describing disability performance challenges, casting, and the fight for equitable (and accurate!) representation. Others include “disability drag,” “disability masquerade,” the “disability con,” and “disability simulations.” This class explores the artistic impact and implementation of this vocabulary in disability performance and theater.

Together we will read plays and musicals including Good Beer, Children of a Lesser God, Passion, Venus, and The Cost of Living to better-understand how disabled embodiment shapes theatrical productions. We’ll also be in conversation with contemporary Disability Studies and Performance Studies theorists such as Carrie Sandahl, Tobin Siebers, Ann M. Fox, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Patrick McKelvey, and Ellen Samuels. Students will create an original research paper or creative project that asks: How does disability impact the world of the play? What must we do to produce work that features disability ethically?  Why is accessibility a necessary consideration in our design and casting processes, rehearsal rooms, and performance spaces?

Have you ever been unable to enter a building? Do you have difficulty seeing the board, or hearing a teacher, in class? If so, do you feel like you are still “normal?” This course is about the myths and paradoxes surrounding ability and disability in the United States. We’ll be thinking about disability is understood through (and in opposition to!) our conceptions of normal, abnormal, and “Other.” During this term, we will approach disabled embodiment through a variety of approaches that inflect disability studies—medical diagnosis, social construction, literary characters, and media representations—in an effort to more richly understand the construction of the “normal” human body as an organizing principle for participating in America’s public sphere. In this section of WRTG101, we will be in conversation with a wide range of disabled voices and allies who discuss contemporary issues such as healthcare access, persistent social stigmas, cultural art production, political activism, the ethics of genetic editing. Students will learn to scaffold original research projects through freewriting responses, annotated bibliographies, and a conventional research paper. Students finish the semester by transitioning academic genres to public-facing writing through social media posts and an academic blog essay.

In an August 27, 2022 interview with Fox News, Republican Colorado Congresswoman and gun rights activist Lauren Boebert declared that student loan forgiveness is unfairly “robbing Americans Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory.” Boebert’s derisive invocation of queer creative works was meant to discredit governmental action to empower citizens’ financial freedom, but it more aptly played on conservative beliefs about what kinds of knowledges and communities “belong” in higher education and merit study. For crip, queer, and trans communities, creative art forms like dance, ballroom, film, performance art, theatre, and spoken word poetry are worldbuilding projects that constitute kinship, mutual aid, political action and, yes, theory–a rubric for understanding the world and its systems that we navigate to survive and thrive.

This course examines the intersections between crip, queer, and trans theory–modes of analysis grounded in the struggles and world-making disabled/crip, LGBTQ+, women, and people of color. Artists, political activists, and theorists have mobilized crip, queer, and trans performance to interrogate the intersections of ability, class, race, gender, and nationhood as a response to the inherent ableism and heterosexism within U.S. American notions of health and politics. We will examine the development of, and overlap between crip, queer, and trans theory through both academic and artistic domains; consider what performance has to say about education, community, wellness, identity, and neoliberalism; and articulate the role of crip/queer/trans analysis in imagining for racial, gender, sexual, disability, and economic justice.

In this class we will look at how science and culture combine to create the idea of what “normal” human bodies should be in our popular culture—films, novels, plays, musicals, poetry, and other performance-oriented media.  

Together we will explore the myths and paradoxes surrounding ability and disability in America, and serves as an introduction to the burgeoning field of Disability Studies. We will examine the historical moments and cultural ruptures that allowed “disability” as a term to emerge, and examine our frameworks for apprehending and accommodating for physical and/or cognitive impairments. During this term we will approach disabled embodiment through a variety of approaches that inflect disability studies—including performance theory, feminist theory, critical race studies, freak studies, bioethics, and literary analysis—in an effort more richly understand the construction of the “normal” human body as an organizing principle for participating in America’s public sphere cultural commons.

This course takes performance as a starting point because normative bodies are frequently used to portray and measure insufficiency qua disability, further exacerbating concerns about disability as an undesirable mutation while seeming to reference disabled persons as an expansion of neoliberal diversity initiatives. In short—what we read and see in our media diets is naturalized and normalized, but oftentimes the incorporation of disability in pop culture is at the expense of the reality of disabled embodiment. By examining our cultural products featuring disabled bodies, we can uncover complex negotiations of the bodily anxieties we hold as individuals and as a species too.

A patient cannot be diagnosed with insanity, but a defendant can be found not guilty by reason of insanity. While “psychopathy” is not part of the DSM-5—the manual used by practitioners to identify psychological disorders—it is widely accepted as an established condition shared by a number of dangerous criminals. Depression and schizophrenia are universal mental illnesses, but other disorders are entirely culture-bound, often limited to specific periods within a culture’s history. In the Middle Ages, for example, melancholy and hysteria among were attributed to a build-up of fluids in the uterus or possession by the devil. Today, concepts of “madness” have been supplanted by scientific knowledge about brain anatomy, neurotransmitters, and stressors, but it is still unclear what it means to be “sane.” Are we really all mad here? 

This course explores the history of insanity in the western world through the lenses of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and the law. Students begin with an introduction to pre-scientific conceptions of mental illness, tracing their echoes through modern society. They then turn to the origins of psychiatry, with the rise of asylums and institutionalization, and the roles played by both in terms of regulating “deviant” behaviors. Students delve into the murky relationship between mental health and the law, analyzing the ways in which our emerging medical understanding intersected with notions of free will, moral responsibility, and social norms. Finally, students consider mental illness in a more contemporary context, focusing on topics like deinstitutionalization, the creation of the DSM-5 (and its predecessors), the anti-psychiatry movement, and the ethics underlying all of the difficult questions that arise when broaching such issues. Through discussions, readings, research, and case studies, students gain an understanding of the difficulties in defining specific neurotypical standards for social behaviors, as well as a greater appreciation for the ways in which religion, science, philosophy, psychology, and the law shape one another.

Emerging scholar-artists in theater and drama necessarily focus on skill, craft, and presentation. This course proposes a parallel path of artist-scholarship to enrich the students’ portfolios, communities, and fields. Focusing on writing and presentation, students experience research as a dramaturg might; that is, as a rigorous but practical approach to scholarship. This is a research methods seminar for Theatre graduate students. We will focus on individual research and writing–and on reading and commenting on each other’s work. The central course goal for each student is to produce a primary-source research paper that, with some revision, can be–and will be–submitted to a peer-reviewed scholarly conference or journal. I hope this sounds more exciting than intimidating. We will work collaboratively and deliberately, moving from central questions and reviews of relevant scholarship to formal proposals and preliminary and final drafts.

Disability and film have a complicated relationship. We are used to seeing actors regularly portray disabled characters to garner acclaim and awards, but in everyday life, society seems to “screen” actual disabled people out of public life–they are hidden, avoided, undiscussed. Moreover, some of the major advancements in cinema history are innovations designed to “overcome” the problem of how to portray the disabled body as it moves through our ableist world. In this course, we will examine this paradox of optical avoidance and spectacle in order to learn about the cultural situatedness of disability as well as to better attend to the ways in which disability fuels filmic creativity. The majority of cinema featuring disability attempts to use visual, audio, and editing alterations in order to capture the unique experiences of disabled lives–but the films themselves are unevenly accessible to disabled patrons. As we move through a range of U.S. American Hollywood, international, and amateur films, we will interrogate the paradox and predicament of portraying disabled bodies in a medium designed for a narrow range of bodily capacities, forms, and aesthetics. Considering issues such as the ethics of casting, tropes of disability representation, film technologies and accessibility practices, and our aesthetic relationship to both disabled and normate bodies, students will build original research papers in the intersection of national identity, disability, film, and performance studies.

This is a course in 20th–-21st century modernism and postmodernism in the theatre. It surveys evolving modernist/postmodernist theatre practices in their cultural and intellectual contexts, paying particular attention to the aesthetic evolution from one artistic philosophy to the next. Along the way, Naturalism, Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dada are explored, as well as Marxism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, and several other theatrically influential aesthetic and theoretical isms. Course readings include plays, manifestos, and aesthetic theories. Course methodology focuses on the explication of historical performances and their relationship to the social and political circumstances in which they occurred.

THEA 101: Performance & Society introduces theatre and performance as artistic practice, creative action, a way of knowing, and a record and unfolding of culture. Combining the disciplinary domains of social science and the arts, the performances and performance practices we study range from the scared, to the artistic, to the commercial (and often more than one of these at once). This course positions the study of performance as interdisciplinary-drawing from foundational texts in sociology, anthropology, and literature, just as it draws from such other art forms as visual art, architecture, dance, and music.

We work from the following three interrelated premises:

• art and culture shape each other;

• performance happens everywhere-in many geographies, and in spaces real and virtual; &

• theatre and dance are human endeavors that tell us about the past, rehearse the present, and point to possible futures.

To test these ideas, students will participate in projects that explore the limits and extremities of performance through the lenses of theatre studies and social science, fields that view performance as human endeavor, and everyday life as performance, respectively.

Through the study of selected works, Play Analysis students learn techniques for analyzing play structure in a manner vital for performing artists, directors, and designers. Plays are selected from a variety of periods in theatrical history, from Antiquity to the Present. Students will gain fluency with the genres of tragedy and comedy, and learn various stylistic approaches to interpreting theatrical works.

This class will teach students to identify areas of academic interest, develop questions for research and artistic inquiry, and employ new methodologies to create original scholastic and creative work. The goal of the course is to equip students to find the tools necessary for thorough script analysis over a wide range of dramatic styles and genres. Together, we’ll gain a basic understanding of scripts through analyzing them as a map for the theatre practitioner, learn the tools of discovering character through textual building blocks, and construct a personalized regimen for to help you prepare for the production process. In this class, we’ll approach play analysis as less as a sacrosanct or solely academic exercise and more as a practical tool for making informed creative choices to utilize in performance.

“The theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake." — Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write           

“What the heck's a dramaturg?” — Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 2006

In THEA 211, Dramaturgy, you will not only learn the answer to the Chicago Tribune's question, you will get a chance to put that knowledge into practice. Dramaturgy is a nebulous and evolving field, with job requirements ranging from old-fashioned research to audience outreach, and season development to choosing and cultivating new plays. This course is a practical examination of dramaturgy and theatrical criticism as it is practiced in the U.S. Dramaturgs are a vital, if often overlooked or misunderstood, part of a production team. We will pair classic and contemporary plays with key dramaturgical writings to explore how the forms developing in theatre has a reciprocal, co-constructive relationship with a play’s content. Put another way: a play’s topic shapes how it is told, and the act of telling shapes the world of the play. “Dramaturg” comes from the German word for playwright, but Dramaturgy is not only the study of a dramatic work’s composition—its plot, characters, themes, imagery, reception, and production histories; it is an interdisciplinary field whose practitioners want to better understand how and why we tell stories about our histories, our politics, our identities, and what these stories might mean. 

This course does not presume an extensive familiarity with Western traditions of dramatic literature or theory and is designed for a novice in theater scholarship. In the beginning third of the course, you will learn basic theoretical frameworks for engaging with dramatic literature, covering a range of approaches from drama in Antiquity to classic 20th-century theatre practitioners and contemporary scholars. As students gain facility with fundamental methodologies for studying drama we will engage plays that collectively form a contemporary canon either by frequent production or their critical reception. This class will work to develop the skills students need to succeed as a dramaturg: critical thinking, research skills, communication skills, analytic and creative approaches to text, and then apply them specifically to the process of dramaturgy.

In American theater, artists commonly use the phrase “color-blind” casting to refer to the practice of casting “without seeing color”—meaning that the best person for the role is cast, regardless of race. This trend towards “universality”—seeing all bodies as equal on stage—would perhaps be fine if all bodies were equal in the society that American theater represents. But, as the disproportionate, systemic, and ongoing violence against black and brown bodies represents, American politics is far from being deliberately and compassionately color-conscious, let alone “color-blind.”

This course examines performances of race in its diverse forms, using the creations of disenfranchised artists to hold space with the cultural, political, and social injustices they fought—and continue to fight—against. From antebellum minstrelsy practices that paved the way for college students using blackface on TikTok, to Brenden Jacob-Jenkins’ 2014 play Appropriate, about a white family that discovers their father’s participation in public lynchings, and contemporary Senate debates on the Emmitt Till Antilynching Bill, students explore the various ways American artists use their craft to debate issues of race, the body, and political belonging. Together, we will analyze how theater illustrates precarity as a form of structural vulnerability enabled and sustained by neoliberalism, racialization, disability, gender, and sexuality.

 Students also interrogate the ways white authors have critiqued American eugenics (O’Neill, Strange Interlude) and how Latinx, Arab-American, and Asian-American playwrights push us beyond a simplistic white/black racial binary in plays such as William S. Yellow Robe’s Rez Politics, Larissa Fasthorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, and Virginia Grise’s Blu. Critical readings will engage a range of BIPOC feminist writers such as Cherríe Moraga, Korinta Mitchell, Nicole Fleetwood, and bell hooks; queer of color/crip of color critiques from Jackie Wang, E. Patrick Johnson, Kara Keeling, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; critical race theorists W.J.T. Mitchell, Lewis R. Gordon, and Calvin Warren; and performance scholars including Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Donatella Galella, and Tamsen Wolff.

In this course, students study social commentary through the arts and political discourse to develop a deeper understanding of how bodies are imagined in American politics, culture, and history. They practice literary analysis and persuasive writing through short response essays, collaborative presentations, and in-class conversations with theater artists in D.C. and around the country and scaffold writing toward an original research paper. The class will culminate in students using their research papers to curate a historically-grounded lobby exhibit designed for a D.C.-area theater company.

“You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question.” 

— Anton Chekhov                         

“Art is craft, not inspiration.”

— Stephen Sondheim 

“Musical theater has always meant expression to me. It makes me sit back in my seat and say, ‘How did they put all of that into words?’” 

— Rachel Zegler 

Musicals In Question is an upper-level seminar that traverses the often contested terrain of the American musical. Students in this class will be encouraged to look beyond surface-level plots and catchy tunes by formulating research questions that challenge prevailing narratives in musical theatre scholarship. We will assess how certain productions reiterate or subvert dominant stereotypes, illuminating how performance can reinforce social hierarchies or serve as a tool for critique and empowerment. By engaging with a range of primary sources—scripts, song lyrics, performance clips, archival materials—and placing them in dialogue with scholarly criticism, participants will develop nuanced perspectives on the genre's historical evolution and contemporary meanings. A key focus of our inquiry will be on embodied representation: the physicality of race, gender, sexuality, and disability as enacted onstage. By interrogating casting practices, directorial choices, choreographic motifs, and design elements, we will see how musicals not only entertain but also transmit values and assumptions about whose stories are worthy of center stage. Students will learn to identify these markers and articulate how such performance dimensions speak to broader cultural dynamics. The course, therefore, foregrounds questions of visibility and agency: who has the power to tell stories, and what are the implications for audiences and communities often relegated to the margins?

Methodologically, we will draw from historiographic, cultural theory, and performance studies frameworks to bridge textual and performative analysis. We will experiment with different modes of inquiry—including written reflections, in-class debates, and creative projects—to cultivate interpretive agility. Students will hone their ability to synthesize diverse perspectives into persuasive arguments, aiming to reflect the broader conversations happening in theatre and performance studies today. By assessing musicals as living, mutable texts that can and do change with each revival, touring production, or film adaptation, students will learn to place each work within its social, cultural, and political milieu. Ultimately, Musical Theatre In Question aspires to equip students with a toolkit for scholarly and creative engagement: from discerning the artistic choices that shape a show’s aesthetics to theorizing the ethical considerations behind its representations. In so doing, we will explore how musicals function as mirrors of their time and how they can potentially reshape collective imaginations. Students will leave the course better prepared to identify pressing research areas, formulate original inquiries, and employ robust methods to illuminate the hidden complexities of a genre often beloved yet seldom interrogated in all its social and cultural dimensions. 

Critical Approach to the Cinema introduces you to one of the most powerful media of our time: film. In this course, you will learn to evaluate and interpret movies, skills that require the comprehension of minute detail, and the ability to probe the artistic intentions of directors. Throughout this course, you will develop fluency in cinematic grammar—framing, mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound—together with a variety of theoretical constructs and contexts, such as genres, auteurism, gender, race, and sexuality, in order to interpret film texts. Together, we will consider how embodied difference intersects with questions of cinematic production and commercial film.

This course does not presume an extensive familiarity with filmic techniques or cinema history and is designed for a novice in film scholarship. In the beginning third of the course, you will learn basic grammar of film techniques for engaging with cinema, covering a range of approaches from late 19th and 20th-century filmmakers and contemporary directors. After gaining facility with fundamental methodologies for studying cinema, we will engage movies that collectively represent important nodal points in cinema canon either by production innovation or their critical reception. Moving through these works, we will interpret differences in genre to help situate each film’s intervention into debates about life in its historical moment. By attending screenings and writing critically about cinema, you will learn how to engage with filmic forms that might challenge your expectations of a “good” movie; you will also develop critical tools for critiquing the roles of the individual spectator and wider audience, as well as the efficacy of a production’s realization of the world on screen. By questioning, supportive conversation around, and critical evaluation of, existing art, the goal is that we enhance our knowledge of how to approach artistic creations critically.

History of American Musical Theatre seminars survey American musical theatre from social, cultural, and aesthetic perspectives. In this class, we will uncover the complex and enmeshed relationship between Hollywood and Broadway, and ask why the relationship between stage and screen is both fraught and celebrated. The actor’s body is the central storytelling vehicle in musicals–the triple-threat performer must sing, dance, and act with equal skill over several performances a week. But, the musical has a complicated relationship with film given how the camera decenters the body by guiding, framing, and editing our vision of the musical work and actor’s performance. Tracing the development of the triple-threat actor from Hollywood’s earliest movie musicals and Golden Era forward to our contemporary performance culture that is rife with adaptations, this course examines the spectacle of the body in musicals and what the actor’s body reveals about U.S. politics and culture. As we move through a range of musicals engineered for the screen or adapted from the stage, we will interrogate the paradox and predicament of portraying raced, gendered, and nonconforming bodies in a medium designed for a narrow range of bodily capacities, forms, and aesthetics. Considering issues such as the ethics of casting, tropes of gender and racial representation, how film technologies shape spectatorship, and our aesthetic relationship to both the “normate” body, students will build original research papers in the intersection of musical theatre, film, and performance studies. 

This is an introductory course in creative writing. During the semester, you will both read and write short fiction, poetry, and play scenes. Students will learn about the creative writing process, study fundamental elements of fiction, poetry, and playwriting; and read a variety of stories, poems, and plays by contemporary writers. However, most of our work will be aimed at developing your own writing skills via in-class exercises and out-of-class assignments. Major assignments will be read and critiqued in workshops by your fellow classmates and myself. To encourage thinking about how good writing occurs “between the drafts,” as Nancy Sommers writes, at the end of the semester students will produce a substantive revision of your short story and a narrative letter. Throughout this course we will have regular individual conferences with discuss your progress, develop editing skills, and set new writing goals.

Imitations introduces you to one of the most enduring forms of arts education: imitation. In this course you will learn to evaluate and interpret poems, skills which require the comprehension of minute detail and the ability to probe the artistic intentions of their authors, in order to create original work of your own. Throughout this course you will develop fluency in a poetic language and technique—personification, apostrophe, synesthesia, meter, rhythm, aphorism, enjambment, voice, style, form, and meaning—together with a variety of critical approaches, such as conversations about genres, media, and identity, in order to interpret and create poetic work. 

This is a special topics course in creative writing. During the semester, you will both read and write short poetry and criticism. You will learn about the creative writing process, study fundamental elements of poetry, and engage with a variety of canonical/non/contemporary writers. However, most of our work will be aimed at developing your own writing skills via in-class exercises and workshops. The major assignments will be read and critiqued in workshops by your fellow classmates and myself. Your final portfolio will be a revision of your cumulative poems and a rationale. Throughout this course we will have regular individual conferences with discuss your progress, develop editing skills, and set new writing goals.