Research
My research examines how theatre makers stage anxiety during periods of social rupture. I conceptualize anxiety as a historically situated affect shaped by modernization, state power, cultural regulation, and psychological discourse. My work has examined U.S. plays produced in relation to 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the 2016 presidential election.
Most recently, my dissertation focuses on German theatrical Expressionism from the late nineteenth century into the interwar period. I argue that anxiety functioned as a constitutive theatrical convention of Expressionism rather than merely as an effect of performance. Expressionist theatre not only staged strategies for living with anxiety, but also engaged humanistic values while rejecting nationalist narratives, particularly amid the rise of fascism. I further examine the Nazi Party’s campaign to suppress Expressionism as part of a broader effort to appropriate the theatricalization of anxiety for fascist political spectacle, including book burnings, the Degenerate Art exhibition, and political rallies. In doing so, I challenge dominant historiographies that diagnose, minimize, or misunderstand German theatrical Expressionism as an avant-garde movement, arguing instead that such interpretations risk reproducing the Nazi regime’s degenerate art narrative.
My research asks how theatre functions as an affective technology during moments of social crisis and how theatre makers adapt form, production, and circulation in response to such ruptures. Addressing these questions enables me to reconsider theatre produced in moments of social rupture on its own terms, rather than minimizing it in relation to the larger historical events that surround it.
Theoretically, my work engages affect theory, trauma studies, psychology, and historiography.
I draw on theories of collective affect to analyze how anxiety circulates among performers, audiences, institutions, and the state, shaping theatrical form and reception. Performance studies frameworks further inform my analysis of theatre as an embodied, relational practice—one capable of producing meaning and community even when visibility is constrained. Together, these approaches position theatre as an active site of resistance, survival, and ethical negotiation rather than as a passive reflection of historical events.
Methodologically, my research combines archival investigation with performance historiography and cultural analysis. I work with scripts, production records, correspondence, reviews, and ephemera, paying particular attention to fragmentary and incomplete archives produced by censorship or erasure. Rather than treating absence as a limitation, I read silence and fragmentation as historically meaningful, revealing the conditions under which theatre persisted outside official channels. This methodological commitment expands the boundaries of theatre history by accounting for practices that unfolded in private spaces, temporary communities, and carceral contexts.
My current and future research extend this framework by examining how theatre responds to collective anxiety across diverse historical and geopolitical contexts. Across these projects, my work contributes to ongoing debates in theatre and performance studies concerning canon formation, affect, historiography, and the politics of memory.