Academic Research, Writing & Teaching
A lioness and her captive audience. Photo by Gowri Vijayakumar.
My research is concerned with questions of performance, political violence and the figure of the animal. I work mostly on Eastern Africa, though sometimes my comparativist training draws my attention elsewhere. My current book project, entitled The Animal Subaltern: Performing Race and Species in East Africa, explores the ways in which racialized animal figures structure both the politics of performance and the performance of politics in Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia from the 1910s to the present. I am also working to translate the complete plays of Tanzanian dramatist Ebrahim Hussein from Swahili into English. If all goes according to plan, a critical edition of these plays will appear in 2023.
My academic and critical writing has appeared in ASTR Online, Theatre Journal, The Johannesburg Salon, Theatre Survey, Performance Research, Modern Drama, African Theatre and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Please see my academia.edu page for more information and PDFs.
In rehearsal with student actors. Photo by Alessandra Mello, courtesy of TDPS.
I am currently an A.C.L.S. Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at Tufts University. From 2020 to 2023, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Theater Arts at Brandeis University, where I taught courses on African literature, animal studies, postcolonial theory, theatre history and decolonial pedagogy. From 2018 to 2020, I was an Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow in the Drama Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where I taught courses in theatre studies, dramatic literature, theatre history and critical theory. From 2016 to 2018, I served as a Preceptor of Expository Writing at Harvard University, where I taught freshmen writing seminars, including a course of my own design on Black autobiography. Before that, I laid the groundwork for my teaching career as a PhD student in Performance Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where I taught courses in new play development, race and ethnicity in U.S. dramatic literature, and acting technique.
Images below (and on the main page) are taken from the Bestiarium of the 19th-century Austrian artist Aloys Zötl. From left to right: “Der Gepard” (1886), “Das Kamel” (1846) and “Der Elch” (1886). All three images are taken from prints made of Zötl’s original watercolors.