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 tracks the global trajectories of modern drama and performance, with an emphasis on British and American theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I'm broadly engaged with scholarly conversations surrounding gender and sexuality, diaspora and migration, modernist studies, and the history of philosophy. My current book manuscript, Profaning Acts: The Drama of Religion on the Modern Stage, explores how British and American dramatists became newly fascinated with religion after the turn of the twentieth century, and shows how playwrights' investigations of religious belief drew them into vexed encounters with global performance practices. My scholarship has appeared in venues including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and Modernism/modernity Print Plus.
I earned my PhD from the Department of English at Harvard University, where my work received the 2017 Howard Mumford Jones Prize. At Harvard, I taught in the Department of English, the Program on History and Literature, and the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration, and I was awarded multiple Certificates of Distinction in Teaching. Additionally, I have held appointments at Emerson College, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Virginia, and Southern Methodist University. From 2013–2016, I served as the Executive Director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, where I was also Assistant Director from 2012–2013. I am currently the Book Review Editor at Modern Drama.
I earned my PhD from the Department of English at Harvard University, where my work received the 2017 Howard Mumford Jones Prize. At Harvard, I taught in the Department of English, the Program on History and Literature, and the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration, and I was awarded multiple Certificates of Distinction in Teaching. Additionally, I have held appointments at Emerson College, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Virginia, and Southern Methodist University. From 2013–2016, I served as the Executive Director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard, where I was also Assistant Director from 2012–2013. I am currently the Book Review Editor at Modern Drama.
