Location: ML 243
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. My research explores performance history in the US and Canada, focusing on intersections with journalism, mass communication, and political and community organizing in the 20th and 21st centuries.
My first book, Staged News: The US Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York explores a Depression-era collaboration between theatre artists and journalists. You can hear me talk about it here. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press (2023) in its Journalism and Democracy series, the book was awarded a Brooks McNamara publication subvention by the American Society for Theatre Research and shortlisted for the Frank Luther Mott – Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism & Mass Communication Research Award.
More recently, I have begun to explore journalistic imagination in contemporary art and performance, as well as early 20th century Jewish labor organizing. In conjunction with my interest in political performance, I have a keen interest in community-engaged teaching and public programming. Prior to joining Waterloo in 2017, I was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Humanities at the University of Richmond (2016-17), and the Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (2015-16).
Education:
Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University, 2015
Books:
Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York.Journalism and Democracy. University of Massachusetts: 2023.)
Articles and Chapters:
“‘News Tending:’ Community Engagement Work in Live Journalism and Living Newspapers.” Canadian Theatre Review 203 (2025): 16-23.
“‘A Gesture of Hope:’ Living Newspaper: A Counter-Narrative at the Royal Court Theatre (an interview with Vicky Featherstone by Jordana Cox).” Federal Theatre Project (1935-1939): contexte & enjeux/context & issues (2023): 227-242.
“The Loudspeaker and the Little Man: mass media and democratic participation in the Federal Theatre Project’s “One-Third of a Nation.” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 23.2 (July 2020): 121-147.
“Finding Freedom in Black Radical Manuscripts.” Invited Roundtable on Kate Dossett’s Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. Black Perspectives and The Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 15 July 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/finding-freedom-in-black-radical-manuscripts/?fbclid=IwAR1DCenB6DzlGMVW-xJTkSNgxCpjZgyRt-BzCJnUF4-Y3aTsbwnCdfyXnmA.
With Lauren Tilton. “The digital public humanities: Giving new arguments and new ways to argue.” Review of Communication 19, no. 2 (2019): 127-146.
“The Phantom Public, the Living Newspaper: Reanimating the Public in the Federal Theatre Project's 1935 (New York, 1936).” Theatre Survey 58, no. 3 (2017): 300-325.
“Face-to-Face” Open Secularism and the Politics of Display in Quebec’s Bouchard-Taylor Commission” Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics. 2017. Ed. Milija Gluhovic and Jisha Menon. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 135-157.
Selected grants, awards, fellowships
Outstanding Performance Award, 2024, Faculty of Arts, University of Waterloo.
PI, Insight Development Grant, SSHRC, 2020, for “Newsworthy: Journalistic imagination in Alexandra Bell's Counternarratives and Hill and Silvera's Liberty Deferred.”
Courses Taught
COMMST/THPERF 220 Performance Studies
COMMST 223 Public Speaking
COMMST 227 Leadership
COMMST 228 Public Communication
COMMST 399 Communication Inquiry
COMMST/THPERF 440 Performative Inquiry