2017
A two-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for twenty faculty studying sexual violence. The institute was held at Elon University in North Carolina and hosted by Dr. Ann Cahill. Application to the institute was competitive and acceptance carried a monetary award.
2012
Award presented to a single student in each College at Florida State University; the award is based on academic performance, university service, and other contributions both in and out of the classroom.
2012
Award presented by the Florida Higher Education Arts Network as a part of the Florida Culture Alliance’s Arts & Culture Day.
2011
Honors faculty members who have had an intellectual, inspirational, and integrative impact on the lives of their students. Nominations submitted by students.
2011
Awarded to “The Erotics of Male/Male Rape?” by the Theory & Criticism Focus Group for the best graduate-student paper utilizing theory or criticism presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Chicago 2011.
2018-present
Serving as a member of the editorial board for the new online journal Imagined Theatres, edited by Daniel Sack.
2018-2019
Serving on the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Conference Committee for the 2019 conference in Orlando organized by Andrew Gibb. The conference theme is Scene Changes: Performing, Teaching, and Working through the Transitions.
2017-present
Serving on the American Society for Theatre Research Awards Committee for the Collaborative Research Award.
2008-present
My home at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. I served as an at-large board member for 2008-2009, as the treasurer from 2010-2013 and 2015-present, and as the focus group representative for 2016-2017. My work with this Focus Group has also involved preconference-planning as well as our most recent name-change, which added the Q.
2017-2018
Serving on the American Society for Theatre Research Program Conference Committee for the 2018 conference in San Diego organized by Chase Bringardner, Christin Essen, and Kirsten Pullen. The conference theme is Arousal: Theatre, Performance, Embodiment.
2017-2018
Serving on the Program Committee for Song, Stage and Screen XIII. The 2018 conference will be held at UCLA’s new Center for Musical Humanities under the direction of Raymond Knapp, Holley Replogle-Wong, and Jessica Sternfeld. The conference theme is The Musical and Its Others, Then and Now.
2015-2016
This subcommittee was developed and headed by the president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Patricia Ybarra. The group was tasked with tackling the issue of diversity within university and college theatre departments.
2013-2015
This task force was formed at the pleasure of the president of the American Society for Theatre Research. The group investigates labor in the university system as well as ways in which national organizations such as ASTR can work to assist those working in these systems.
2020
Pavithra Prasad cites an idea from “My Father’s Pulse” in her piece “In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief” for the Spring 2020 (7.1) issue of QED: a Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking as she thinks about chosen families, biological families, and queer kinship experienced through loss.
2020
Alexandra Kolb cites my book chapter “Viewing the Pornographic Theatre” in her essay in Dance Chronicle 43.1. Her essay critically interrogates the trend toward the exposure of intimate life and sexuality in performance by examining Pina Bausch’s Window Washer (1997) and Michael Parmenter’s A Long Undressing (1995), and she cites my assessment of Ann-Liv Young’s Cinderella to discuss the possibilities of the pornographic.
2019
Director Noam Shapiro cites the last section of my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd in the notes for his production of Sweeney at the Yale Dramatic Association in late November 2019: “To many, Sweeney Todd depicts a world in which everything bends towards destruction. But, as Sondheim scholar Aaron C. Thomas reminds us, the musical is also a fable—the ‘Ballad’ insists on this—and it’s a story that has been told countless times and with different variations across generations. Thinking about the show as the repetition of a tragic ritual opens up a space for hope: The tale can be told differently. Perhaps the next time we feel the pull of the violence that we’ve ritualized as a society we will simply say no. It’s in our power to break the cycle. But there’s work to be done, so much work.”
2019
This article for the Lynchburg News and Advance takes a decidedly obnoxious tone (referring to The Sea Voyage as “hella old”), but I was happy to speak to The Burg about Jacobean Theatre, Renaissance comedy, and my friend Patrick Earl’s production of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s play at Randolph College.
2019
In the Studies in Musical Theatre (13.2) special issue on the work of Stephen Sondheim, Robert Gordon includes my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd and Olaf Jubin’s book Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods in his overview of recent Sondheim scholarship. (pp. 197-204)
2019
Donatella Galella cites my article “Watching Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” in her discussion of Lorraine Hansberry in chapter four of America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, entitled “Cultivating Raisin and the Popular Black Musical”.
2019
Danica Čerče cites my piece “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” heavily in her article “Race and Politics in the Twentieth-century Black American Play: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun”, which appears in issue 46 of the journal Neohelicon.
2019
Pannill Camp, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and Harvey Young discuss (as their third segment of the pod) my constant griping about the confusing misuse and abuse of the term performative by scholars in the field of theatre and performance studies to mean something akin to the word theatrical.
2018
I was interviewed for The Burg, also known as Lynchburg’s News and Advance, about director Dustin Williams’ production of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The piece, by Emma Schkloven, includes a good deal of information found in the first chapter of my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd.
2018
I was interviewed for The Burg, also known as Lynchburg’s News and Advance, about As You Like It, my work for Endstation Theatre Company, and dramaturgy in general. This piece also contains a really lovely portrait and some great photos of us rehearsing in our outdoor space.
2018
This a promotional article on Broadway World Miami describing Nicky Wood’s one-man show Yes Sir, That’s My Broadway at the Barn Theatre in Stuart, FL. Nicky gives me a shout-out as one of his inspirational and passionate theatre history teachers. What a sweetheart!
2017
Sarah Orem cites “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” in her article “Signifyin(g) When Vexed: Black Feminist Revision, Anger, and A Raisin in the Sun” in Modern Drama 60.2 (Summer 2017).
2017
For Samuel French’s Breaking Character Magazine. This is a roundtable interview about the continuing importance of the playwright Joe Orton. David Kimple interviewed producers David Dreyfoos and Annie Keefe, performer Kate Reynolds, and me.
2017
For NSM Today, a UCF student publication, I was given the opportunity to discuss Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s work, linking her piece Pieta to performances in which mothers grieve for their children onstage throughout theatre history. The piece was written by Desiree Montilla.
2016
Maria Tsouvala & Katia Savrami cite my chapter on explicit performance and Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella in their piece “The Human Body in Contemporary Dance: from Costumes to Nakedness” which appears in Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques issue 13 (June 2016).
2016
Nick Salvato very generously cites a talk I gave in 2014 entitled “In Search of a Culture That Isn’t Appropriate/d” in his (truly brilliant) book Obstruction from Duke University Press.
2016
For volume 1, issue 1 of PARtake: the Journal of Performance as Research, Lynn Deboeck makes an argument about the way that reviewers performatively (?) construct phantom audiences in their reviews. Her chief object of study in the article is the performance reviews section of Theatre Journal 68.1, edited by Daniel Sack, in which I have a piece on Matthew Aucoin’s opera Crossing. The author discusses my piece extensively (pp. 4-6).
2016
UCF’s student paper NSM Today did a story on our reading and discussion of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The article includes a fun picture of me and the students on the Clybourne Park set during the post-show discussion.
2013
L. Bailey McDaniel cites my essay “Engaging an Icon” in her book (Re)constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-century American Drama from Palgrave Macmillan. Her book’s third chapter is about mammies and sexuality in Cheryl West’s Jar the Floor, Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, and Tony Kushner & Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change, and so she cites my discussion of Caroline’s sexuality in that musical.
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