A sixth-year graduate student at Yale, I specialize in twentieth-century theater, modernist and avant-garde literature and performance, and questions of time and phenomenology in performance.
My dissertation unearths the buried history of an essential and often exquisite genre: the modernist microdrama. Although brief plays have existed since theater’s beginnings, late nineteenth-century playwrights began to reshape the minimal boundaries of dramatic form in response to outworn conventions and an accelerating culture. My project, the first book-length study of theatrical brevity, contends that the very short play warrants at least as much critical attention as the short story, the lyric poem, or the short film. I show how the temporal medium of theater offered modernist artists an ideal venue in which both to represent and to unsettle emergent conceptions of time. Studying drama at its lower limits helps to answer crucial questions posed by performance studies—How does performance occupy and shape time? How do audiences and performances work dynamically to shape each other? What are the minimal requirements for claims on our attention?—by excavating the roots of those questions in the historical avant-gardes of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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My dissertation unearths the buried history of an essential and often exquisite genre: the modernist microdrama. Although brief plays have existed since theater’s beginnings, late nineteenth-century playwrights began to reshape the minimal boundaries of dramatic form in response to outworn conventions and an accelerating culture. My project, the first book-length study of theatrical brevity, contends that the very short play warrants at least as much critical attention as the short story, the lyric poem, or the short film. I show how the temporal medium of theater offered modernist artists an ideal venue in which both to represent and to unsettle emergent conceptions of time. Studying drama at its lower limits helps to answer crucial questions posed by performance studies—How does performance occupy and shape time? How do audiences and performances work dynamically to shape each other? What are the minimal requirements for claims on our attention?—by excavating the roots of those questions in the historical avant-gardes of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Contact me via email:
