“National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and the Construction of American Public Memory” explores how sites of public commemoration created during and after the American Civil War crafted conceptions of American public memory and identities through performative processes. This dissertation looks at three commemorative efforts: the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln,...
This dissertation examines anti-Black race-based ideologies prevalent in early American musical theatre through a multi-faceted case study concerning Morgan Benson, a child actor of the early musical theatre stage, Target Parades of the long nineteenth-century, and The Black Joke. This is an excavation project, seeking to unearth conceptual underpinnings for...
“Embodying Race, Performing Citizenship” investigates racial and ethnic impersonationsin American popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I
focus my analyses on first-generation Irish, Chinese, and Jewish Eastern European artists and
their American-born children during a time when the United States had absorbed the highest
number of...
Although Jewish studies, sociology, and performance studies texts abound with productive scholarship on Jewish men and their contributions to comedy in the mid-century United States, there is remarkably scant attention devoted to the equally significant contributions of their female counterparts. Nowhere is that bias clearer than the peculiar case of...