In my research and teaching, I explore the relation between theater—understood simultaneously as a medium, a practice, an industry, an institution, a social force, and a vibrant malleable set of literary forms—and the social, political, and cultural struggles of early modernity. At the core of those struggles and of my interests lay crucial processes of racial, gender, and identity formation, which I study within a framework that is comparative, transnational, and often transhistorical. My work is thus at the intersection of early modern literary studies, critical race studies, theater and performance studies, and comparative literature.
In my first monograph, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022), I show how performance culture helped turn blackness into a racial category across early modern Western Europe, by dissecting the stagecraft used in early modern theater to represent and racialize Africans and Afro-descendants across borders in early modern England, France, and Spain. At the end of the sixteenth century, in a context of global expansion, what I call the racial matrix produced a new paradigm: the word “race” started referring to phenotypical differences for which skin color quickly became a shorthand. Scripts of Blackness explores how that long-reaching epistemological shift was brought about, how it slowly infiltrated people’s everyday reading of human bodies, and how the racialization of blackness was absorbed into early modern European popular cultures, via the cosmetic, vocal, and kinetic techniques of racial impersonation used by white actors, amateurs, and enthusiasts to represent black characters from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. This book won the 2023 Bevington Award from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, the 2023 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from The British Academy, the 2023 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association, the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Languages Association, and the 2024 First Book Award from the Shakespeare Association of America.
I am currently at work on a second monograph titled The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation, which expands my theorization of the racial matrix by focusing on the representational juxtapositions, frictions, and connections, between Black people and other non-white people in early modern European theatre. The Whiteness Between Us: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation examines how early modern English, French, and Spanish theatre interpolated Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, Romani, and Asian characters into dramaturgies of racial blackness, to argue that those interpolations enabled plays to define or refine the positioning of those non-Black characters of color (and the offstage communities they stood )for vis-à-vis whiteness, thereby locating whiteness at the center of an aspirational global architecture of power relations. Ultimately, this book aims to expose the titular playbooks of racial triangulation that white supremacy has strategically used from early modernity to this day to divide-and-conquer Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
With my colleague Lia Markey, I co-edited the RaceB4Race® volume Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Pre-modern World (ACMRS Press, Spring 2023, Open Access), which asks art historians and cultural historians to think together about the racializing regimes operative in premodern visual culture (from 1300 to 1800) through the lens of Critical Race Theory. This book is the catalogue of the exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race” that I co-curated with the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in 2023. We discuss the exhibition with Erin Allen from “The Rundown” here: WBEZ. This book won the 2024 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers in the “Art Exhibitions” category and it is available in Open Access here. Passionate about visual culture and live performance, I greatly enjoy collaborating with visual artists and theatre makers around creative projects, and I do so frequently as part of the “Black Baroque” programming at UChicago.