Rebecca Kastleman
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
I teach in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where I am also affiliated with Columbia's PhD Program in Theatre and Performance. My research examines how modern drama, theater, and performance theorize collectivity, both by exploring the intersections of dramatic literature with social thought and by studying the implications of performance practice for social and political movements. I'm fascinated by the ways that drama imagines and instantiates new social potentialities, then propels these models beyond the walls of the theater. In the broadest sense, my scholarship shows that, as the shifting cultural climates of modernity produced new conditions for dramatic representation, theater commenced new and potent forms of social work.
My research follows the global trajectories of modern drama and performance, dwelling especially on British and American theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I frequently engage with conversations on drama and philosophy, gender and sexuality, diaspora and migration, and modernist studies. My current book manuscript, Profaning Acts: Drama After Religion on the Modern Stage, reveals how twentieth-century British and American dramatists took up the subject of religion to peer into the histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Profaning Acts recontextualizes the disciplinary foundations of performance studies as it arose in the United States in the later decades of the twentieth century, showing how the field's emphasis on the comparative study of religious ritual flows from the dramatic literature and theater theory circulating in the decades after 1900. Scholarship related to this book and on adjacent subjects has appeared in venues including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, American Quarterly, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.
Before arriving at Columbia, I held appointments at Harvard University, Emerson College, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Virginia, and Southern Methodist University. I earned my PhD from the Department of English at Harvard, where my work received the 2017 Howard Mumford Jones Prize. From 2013–2016, I served as the Executive Director of Harvard's Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, where I was also Assistant Director from 2012–2013. I am currently the Book Review Editor at Modern Drama.
My research follows the global trajectories of modern drama and performance, dwelling especially on British and American theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I frequently engage with conversations on drama and philosophy, gender and sexuality, diaspora and migration, and modernist studies. My current book manuscript, Profaning Acts: Drama After Religion on the Modern Stage, reveals how twentieth-century British and American dramatists took up the subject of religion to peer into the histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Profaning Acts recontextualizes the disciplinary foundations of performance studies as it arose in the United States in the later decades of the twentieth century, showing how the field's emphasis on the comparative study of religious ritual flows from the dramatic literature and theater theory circulating in the decades after 1900. Scholarship related to this book and on adjacent subjects has appeared in venues including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, American Quarterly, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.
Before arriving at Columbia, I held appointments at Harvard University, Emerson College, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Virginia, and Southern Methodist University. I earned my PhD from the Department of English at Harvard, where my work received the 2017 Howard Mumford Jones Prize. From 2013–2016, I served as the Executive Director of Harvard's Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research, where I was also Assistant Director from 2012–2013. I am currently the Book Review Editor at Modern Drama.
