theatre history studies
books available for review
Below is a list of titles received by Theatre History Studies; this list is posted , and it will be updated periodically, as new titles arrive. Books listed were received by January 2025.
Book Review inquiries should be directed to Kellen Hoxworth, Book Review Editor:
Kellen Hoxworth
Department of Theatre & Dance
University at Buffalo – SUNY
285 Alumni Arena
Buffalo, NY 14260
BOOKS RECEIVED
* indicates title assigned for review
Books listed were received by April 2026.
Al-Saber, Samer. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater. Stanford University Press, 2025.
Al-Shamma, Jamas, and Amir Al-Azraki. Theatre of Iraq Under Occupation, 2003-2011. University of Iowa Press, 2025.
*Asari, Masi. Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage. Duke University Press, 2024.
Atkinson, Daniel E. The Rediscovery of George “Nash” Walker: The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America. SUNY Press, 2025.
Bainbridge, Danielle. Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive. New York University Press, 2026.
*Baird, Bruce. A History of Butô. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Benzie, Rebecca. Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play. Methuen Drama, 2024.
Blanco Borelli, Melissa. Aesthetics of Displacement: Movement, Archives, and Performance in Contemporary Colombia. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Brietzke, Zander. Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays. McFarland, 2025.
*Brooks, Helen E.M., and Michael Hammond (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Cantu, Maya. Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
*Carriger, Michelle Liu. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Subjectivity, and Performance Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. Northwestern University Press, 2023.
*Chow, Broderick D.V. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity. Northwestern University Press, 2024.
*Chun, Tarryn Li-Min. Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Ciba, Daniel. Blue Roses: Tennessee Williams, Memory, and the Queer Archive. University of Iowa Press, 2026.
*Cizmar, Elizabeth M. Ernie McClintock and the Jazz Actors Family: Reviving the Legacy. Routledge, 2023.
Clark, Douglas. The Will in English Renaissance Drama. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
*Connelly, Mark. The Group Theatre: An Enduring Legacy. McFarland, 2024.
*Cox, Virginia and Lisa Sampson. Trans. Anna Wainwright. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy: The life and works of Leonora Bernardi. University College London Press, 2023.
Das, Joanna Dee. Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America. University of Chicago Press, 2025.
Della Gatta, Carla. Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
*Dick, Bruce Allen. Thunder on the Stage: The Dramatic Vision of Richard Wright. University of Illinois Press, 2024.
*Dokumacı, Arseli. Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Duke University Press, 2023.
Duncan, A.C. Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
*Elliott, Kenneth. Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York. University of Iowa Press, 2023.
Fawcett, Julia H. Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Fielder, Elizabeth Rodriguez. The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Finburgh Delijani, Clare, and Christian Biet (eds.). A New History of Theatre in France. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Finley, Sarah. Amplifications of Black Sound from Colonial Mexico: Vocality and Beyond. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.
*Fleming Jr., Julius B. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. New York University Press, 2022.
Florescu, Cǎtǎlina Florina. Female Playwrights and Applied Intersectionality in Romanian Theatre. Routledge, 2024.
Foster, Susan Leigh. Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place. Duke University Press, 2025.
Friedman, Andrew. Ibsen Apocalypse: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Six-Hundred-Year Mission to Raise the Ghosts of Modernity. Northwestern University Press, 2026.
Friedman, Andrew, and Eero Laine (eds.). Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
*Gagliardi, Paul. All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Temple University Press, 2023.
Galella, Donatella. Feeling Yellow: Asian Americans and Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Musical Theatre. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Geis, Deborah R. Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Gillespie, Benjamin, and Cindy Rosenthal, with Elinor Fuchs. Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Gonzalez, Anita. Shipping Out: Race, Performance, and Labor at Sea. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Goss, Lindsay. F*ck the Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War. New York: New York University Press, 2024.
Harding, James M. Performance Beyond the Pale: Meditations on Art, Activism, and Bodies in Extremis. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Harding, James M. (ed.). Contours of the Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Harrison, Carol E., and Thomas J. Brown. Zouave Theaters: Transnational Military Fashion and Performance. Louisiana State University Press, 2024.
He, Man. Backstaging Modern Chinese Theatre: Intellectuals, Amateurs, and Cultural Entrepreneurs, 1910s-1940s. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Honeini, Ahmed. Tennessee Williams’s America: Homes, Families, Exile. Routledge, 2026.
Hopkins, Chandra Owensby. Southern Stages: Space and Memory in US Performance. University of Iowa Press, 2025.
Hughes, Amy E. An Actor’s Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
*Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Empire, and Indigeneity. New York University Press, 2024.
Hunter, E.B. Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Hunter, E.B., and Scott Magelssen (eds.). Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
*Igweonu, Kene (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance. Routledge, 2024.
Ireland, John. Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Jakovljevic, Branislav. The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Jannarone, Kimberly. Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Jeong, Areum. K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Johnson, Jake. Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America. University of Illinois Press, 2025.
Keenan, Siobhan. Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage: A ‘Delightful Proteus.’ Bloomsbury, 2025.
Kim Lee, Summer. Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair. Duke University Press, 2025.
Kovacs, Teresa. Theater of the Void: Plasticity, Hauntology, and the Nuclear Blast. Cornell University Press, 2025.
*Krasner, David. 1964, A Year in African American Performance History. Routledge, 2024.
Kuhn, John. Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
*Lalu, Premesh. Undoing Apartheid. Polity Press, 2023.
Layne, Priscilla Dionne, and Lily Tonger-Erk (eds.). Staging Blackness: Representations of Race in German-Speaking Drama and Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Lin, Alisa Ballard. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
Lisi, Leonardo F. Modern Tragedy and the End of Worlds: Lillo, Leopardi, Ibsen. Northwestern University Press, 2026.
*Long, Khalid Y., and Isaiah Matthew Wooden (eds.). August Wilson in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
*MacDonald, Laura, and Ryan Donovan (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre. Routledge, 2023.
Marx, Peter W. Max Reinhardt: From Bourgeois Theater to Metropolitan Culture. Translated by Robert E. Goodwin. Northwestern University Press, 2024.
Mazzio, Carla (ed.). Histories of the Future: On Shakespeare and Thinking Ahead. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024.
*McGillivray, Glen. Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment. Palgrave, 2023.
*McKelvey, Patrick. Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. New York University Press, 2024.
McMaster, James. Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival. Duke University Press, 2025.
Meadows, Harrison. Wild Theater: Staging the Margins of Baroque Ideology in the Spanish Comedia. Vanderbilt University Press, 2025.
Mengesha, Lilian. Critical Dreaming: Feminist Performances Across the Indigenous Americas. New York University Press, 2025.
*Mihaljevich, Michael Paul. The Bird Cage Theater: The Curtain Rises on Tombstone, Arizona’s National Treasure. University of North Texas Press, 2024.
*Mihaylova, Stefka. Viewers in Distress: Race, Gender, Religion, and Avant-Garde Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
Montez, Noe, and Ariel Nereson (eds.). Critical University Studies and Performance. Vanderbilt University Press, 2026.
*Montez, Noe, and Olga Sanchez Saltveit (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance. Routledge. 2024.
Moran, James (ed.). Sean O’Casey in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Morrison, Elise R. Beyond the Fourth Wall of War: Theater and Therapy for Embodied Trauma. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
*Nakamura, Jessica, and Katherine Saltzman-Li (eds.). Realisms in East Asian Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
*Nereson, Ariel. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. University of Michigan Press, 2022.
*O’Quinn, Daniel. Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
Owen, Louise. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalism, Theater, and Performance in Britain. Northwestern University Press, 2024.
Owens, Camille. Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. New York University Press, 2024.
Parry-Davies, Ella. Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
Peters, Julie Stone. Staging Witchcraft Before the Law. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Posner, Dassia N. The Actor’s Revolution: Art and Politics at the Moscow Kamerny Theatre. Northwestern University Press, 2026.
Preston, Carrie J. Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Purkayastha, Prarthana. The Archives and Afterlives of Nautch Dancers in India. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Rao, Nancy Yunhwa. Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond. University of Illinois Press, 2025.
*Ravengai, Samuel. Decolonising African Theatre. Cambridge University Press. 2024.
Reid, Amanda Michelle. Smaddification: Dance and Decolonization in Jamaica. Duke University Press, 2026.
*Román, David, and Sean Edgecomb. The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness, and Radical Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
*Roper, Danielle. Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2025.
*Rossini, Jon D. Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
*Sack, Daniel. Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Samur, Sebastian. Rhythm in Postdramatic Performance Process: Voyages into the Work of Mime Omnibus, Dairakudakan, and SITI Company. Methuen Drama, 2025.
Sández, Laura V. Empathy and Performance: Enactments of Power in Latinx America. Vanderbilt University Press, 2024.
Santana, M. Myrta Leslie. Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
*Scott, Michelle R. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America. University of Illinois Press, 2023.
*Scott-Bottoms, Stephen J. Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2024.
Schmidt, Bryan W., and Weston Twardowski (eds.). Staging Visitation: Tourist Performances and Theatricalized Places. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Sedgman, Kristy, Francesca Coppa, and Matt Hills, eds. Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. University of Iowa Press, 2025.
*Shandell, Jonathan. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Siviter, Clare. Theatre and Censorship in France from Revolution to Restoration. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Snyder-Young, Dani. Sticking Stigma: Performance, Affect, and the Movement of Social Norms. Vanderbilt University Press, 2026.
Spatz, Ben. Race and the Forms of Knowledge. Northwestern University Press, 2024.
*Steen, Shannon. The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
*Stern, Travis. Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era. University of Tennessee Press, 2024.
*Stutterheim, Sydney. Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s. Duke University Press, 2024.
Swift, Christopher. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville: Performing Empire. ARC Humanities Press, 2024.
Tenorio, David. Queer Relajo: Feeling the Nightscapes of Mexicanidad. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
Thomas, Aaron C. The Violate Man: Male/Male Rape in the American Imagination. Vanderbilt University Press, 2025.
*Thompson, Jennifer Joan. Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile: Cultural Policy and the Making of Political Dramaturgies. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
Tillis, Steve. The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre History. Cambridge University Press, 2026.
Valladares, Susan. Stock Pieces: British Repertory Theatre, 1760-1830. Liverpool University Press, 2024.
Xu, Peng. The Courtesan’s Memory, Voice, and Late Ming Drama. University of Michigan Press, 2025.
*Watson, Alex. Staging Systemic Violence: British Theatre 2010-2019. Methuen Drama, 2024.
*Weiss, Naomi. Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama. University of California Press, 2023.
Westgate, J. Chris. Rowdy Carousals: The Bowery Boy on Stage, 1848-1913. University of Iowa Press, 2024.
Werth, Brenda. Fictions of the Real: Synergies Between Screen and Stage in Argentine Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Wiles, David. Democracy, Theatre & Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Williams, Linda. Melodrama as Provocateur. Edited by Christine Gledhill, Laura Horak, and Elisabeth R. Anker. Duke University Press, 2026.
Wolfson, Boris. Travesty Actors: Self and Theater in Stalinist Culture. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
*Wooden, Isaiah Matthew. Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture. Northwestern University Press, 2025.
Worthen, W.B. Theatre as Technology: Apparatus, Nostalgia, Obsolescence. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
*Wynstra, Beth. Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. University of Iowa Press, 2023.
*Young, Hershini Bhana. Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance. New York University Press, 2023.
*Zhulina, Alisa. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life. Northwestern University Press, 2024.