I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. performance and theatre from the nineteenth century to the present. My interests include formations of race, age, gender, and sexuality, and my research integrates the study of theatrical, visual, material, and literary evidence. A graduate of Yale's doctoral program in American Studies, I am an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. I am also a faculty member in Harvard's doctoral program in the History of American Civilization.

My new book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, was published by New York University Press in December 2011 and entered its second printing ten weeks later. Racial Innocence argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early Civil Rights Movement. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, I read theatrical productions, literary works, and material culture. Throughout, I show how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in legally desegregating public spaces and in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself. For more information and advance praise, as well as a links to radio interviews about the book, please click here. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education interviewed me about Racial Innocence in relation to one of my recent articles. I'm also blogging about the book.

I'm currently writing a book titled Paradoxy: Lesbians and the Everyday Art of the Impossible. This book shows how racially diverse lesbians in the U.S. have, since the 1970s, performed paradoxes as a means to imagine lesbian pasts, presents, and futures. Paradoxy--that is, embodied practices that foreground self-contradiction, thwarted invitations, and impossible actions--disintegrates the appearance of queer or straight coherence or singularity. As such, paradoxy constitutes a specifically (although not exclusively) lesbian intervention into both homonormativity and heteronormativity. Paradoxy explodes orthodoxy. My book analyzes practices of paradoxy in works ranging from Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman to Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home, from a set of cardboard sculptures by artist and singer Phranc to the on-stage performances of Nikki Giovanni and Peggy Shaw, and from vernacular photograph albums to mainstream magazine covers. I understand paradoxy as a theory of history, politics, and art--a theory that both informs and challenges current queer theory. My goal in this book is to listen to this theory, to see it, to catch it, and to return it--and thus to restore lesbians to the center of GLBTQ studies. A chapter from Paradoxy, titled "Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre," is forthcoming in African American Review in September 2012.

I have published many articles on performance, theatre, race, sexuality, and material culture. These articles include "Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race," in which I argue that items of material culture "script"--that is, prompt or invite--historically located behaviors (prompts that individuals may execute or resist). The concept of the "scriptive thing" critically informs my work: in both Racial Innocence and Paradoxy, I read scripts embedded in material things to uncover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances. "Dances with Things" won two prizes: the Outstanding Article award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society for the best essay published in English. My other recent essays (in addition to the African American Review article on Nikki Giovanni) include "Children's Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; Or, The Possibility of Children's Literature" (which appeared in PMLA in a special "theories and methodologies" section on children's literature) and "Toward the Integration of Theatre History and Affect Studies: Shame and The Rude Mechs's The Method Gun" (which is forthcoming in the May 2012 issue of Theatre Journal). I've published previous articles on Lorraine Hansberry, Anna Deavere Smith, and Harlem Renaissance playwright Angelina Weld Grimké. Invited book chapters include "The Queerness of Harriet the Spy" in Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature, edited by Kenneth B. Kidd and Michelle A. Abate (University of Michigan Press), and "Staging Lesbian and Gay New York" in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City, edited by Bryan Waterman and Cyrus R. K. Patell (Cambridge University Press). I've also edited two anthologies, Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and Generation Q (Alyson). And I put my interest in gender, ethnicity, and childhood into creative practice when I published a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!