I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. performance and theatre during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 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 just published by New York University Press. 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, please click here. I'm speaking about the book at a lot of public events and on the radio; for a list of upcoming events, please click here. I'm also blogging about the book here.

My other books include the anthologies Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and Generation Q (Alyson). I put my scholarly interests in gender, ethnicity, and childhood into creative practice when I published a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible!.

In December 2009, Social Text published my article, "Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race." In this article, parts of which appear in Racial Innocence, I develop a methodology by which to analyze material culture so as to uncover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances. "Dances with Things" won two prizes: the Outstanding Article in a Journal 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. ATHE interviewed me about "Dances with Things" and its relationship to Racial Innocence.

My most recent essay, "Children's Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; Or, The Possibility of Children's Literature," appeared in PMLA in a special "theories and methodologies" section on children's literature. I have 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).

In 2010-2011, I held a Donald D. Harrington Fellowship through the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, I convened a Symposium, titled "Performing Lesbian Archives," which asked the question, "How can theories and practices of performance reconfigure knowledge of lesbian histories?" This question animates my current book project, which is tentatively titled Hand Knife Photograph: The Erotics of Impossible Gender.