I'm an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Oxford College of Emory University. My research and teaching interests are prison studies, trauma theory, acting and directing, performance studies, modern and contemporary drama, adaptation, and storytelling. I earned my Ph.D. in Theatre Arts with a minor in Directing at Cornell University.
I'm currently revising my dissertation into a monograph for publication, titled Cagecraft: Performance, Race, and Trauma in Carceral America. This project studies modern and contemporary performances made with, by, and about incarcerated people in order to understand how the carceral state itself is a performance structure continually staging racist and classist violence. I not only consider how performance contributes to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements, but also how performance has historically served to support and circulate the logics of imprisonment. In part, this work draws upon five years’ work as a teaching artist in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York, where I co-facilitated a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group.
I'm also a practicing theatre artist, and have directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. Recently, I've directed productions of Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, Max Frisch's The Arsonists, and Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek.
I'm currently revising my dissertation into a monograph for publication, titled Cagecraft: Performance, Race, and Trauma in Carceral America. This project studies modern and contemporary performances made with, by, and about incarcerated people in order to understand how the carceral state itself is a performance structure continually staging racist and classist violence. I not only consider how performance contributes to resistant, liberatory, and abolitionist movements, but also how performance has historically served to support and circulate the logics of imprisonment. In part, this work draws upon five years’ work as a teaching artist in the Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York, where I co-facilitated a company of incarcerated writers and performers, the Phoenix Players Theatre Group.
I'm also a practicing theatre artist, and have directed or performed in over 50 productions in professional, academic, and community-based settings. Recently, I've directed productions of Jaclyn Backhaus' Men On Boats, Lauren Gunderson's Ada and the Engine, Max Frisch's The Arsonists, and Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek.
