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.  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 January 2025.

Adams, Sarah. Repertoires of Slavery: Dutch Theater Between Abolitionism and Colonial Subjection, 1770-1810. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

Adams, Sarah J., Jenna M. Gibbs, and Wendy Sutherland, eds. Staging Slavery: Performances of Colonial Slavery and Race from International Perspectives, 1770-1850. Routledge, 2023.

*Asari, Masi. Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.

*Baird, Bruce. A History of Butô. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Barclay, Kari. Directing Desire: Intimacy Choreography and Consent in the Twenty-First Century. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

*Barker, Roberta. Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022.

Benzie, Rebecca. Feminism, Dramaturgy, and the Contemporary British History Play. London: Methuen Drama, 2024.

Boselli, Stefano. Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentines of Paris. Cham: Palgrave, 2023.

Brooks, Helen E.M., and Michael Hammond. The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Cantu, Maya. Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Carriger, Michelle Liu. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Subjectivity, and Performance Between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023.

Chakrabarti, Sukanya. In-Between Worlds: Performing [as] Bauls in an Age of Extremism. London: Routledge, 2023.

Chow, Broderick D.V. Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024.

Chun, Tarryn Li-Min. Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

*Cizmar, Elizabeth M. Ernie McClintock and the Jazz Actors Family: Reviving the Legacy. London: Routledge, 2023.

*Cox, Virginia and Lisa Sampson. Trans. Anna Wainwright. Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy: The life and works of Leonora Bernardi. London: University College London Press, 2023.

Della Gatta, Carla. Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

*Dick, Bruce Allen. Thunder on the Stage: The Dramatic Vision of Richard Wright. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2024.

*Dokumacı, Arseli. Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

*Dorwart, Jason B. The Incorporeal Corpse: Performing Disability in the Liminal Stage. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.

*Elliott, Kenneth. Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023.

*Fleming Jr., Julius B. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. New York: New York University Press, 2022.

Florescu, Cǎtǎlina Florina. Female Playwrights and Applied Intersectionality in Romanian Theatre. London: Routledge, 2024.

*Gagliardi, Paul. All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023.

Gilbert, Helen, J.D. Phillipson and Michelle H. Raheja, eds. In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Hallinan, Victoria. The Moiseyev Dance Company Tours America: “Wholesome” Comfort during a Cold War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2023.

Harrison, Carol E., and Thomas J. Brown. Zouave Theaters: Transnational Military Fashion and Performance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024.

Hughes, Bethany. Redface: Race, Empire, and Indigeneity. New York: New York University Press, 2024.

Igweonu, Kene (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance. London: Routledge, 2024.

Jackson, Julie. The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. London: Methuen Drama, 2023.

Johnson, Katie N. Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O’Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

*Lalu, Premesh. Undoing Apartheid. Cambridge, UK, and Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press, 2023.

Layne, Priscilla Dionne, and Lily Tonger-Erk (eds.). Staging Blackness: Representations of Race in German-Speaking Drama and Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Long, Khalid Y., and Isaiah Matthew Wooden (eds.). August Wilson in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Łuska, Agata. Polish Theatre Revisited: Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023.

*MacDonald, Laura, and Ryan Donovan (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre. London: Routledge, 2023.

*McGillivray, Glen. Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment. London: Palgrave, 2023.

*McKelvey, Patrick. Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. New York: New York University Press, 2024.

*Mihaljevich, Michael Paul. The Bird Cage Theater: The Curtain Rises on Tombstone, Arizona’s National Treasure. Denton, TX: 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. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 

Mojica, Monique, and Brenda Farnell. Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

Montez, Noe & Olga Sanchez Saltveit. The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance. Routledge. 2024.

Nakamura, Jessica, and Katherine Saltzman-Li (eds.). Realisms in East Asian Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

Nereson, Ariel. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022.

O’Leary, Catherine and Michael Thompson. Theatre Censorship in Spain, 1931–1985. Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2023.

*O’Quinn, Daniel. Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Realignment of the Repertoire, 1780-1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Owen, Louise. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalism, Theater, and Performance in Britain. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024.

Owens, Camille. Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. New York: New York University Press, 2024.

Piccitto, Diane, and Terry F. Robinson (eds.). The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

Poston, Dan. Joseph Addison: An Intellectual Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Prest, Julie (ed.). Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Issues in Research, Writing, and Methodology. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023.

Ravengai, Samuel. Decolonising African Theatre. Cambridge University Press. 2024.

*Román, David, and Sean Edgecomb. The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness, and Radical Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

*Rossini, Jon D. Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Sack, Daniel. Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Schneider, Magnus Tessing, and Meike Wagner (eds.). Performing the Eighteenth Century: Theatrical Discourses, Practices, and Artefacts. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2023.

*Scott, Michelle R. T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023.

Scott-Bottoms, Stephen J. Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024.

Shandell, Jonathan. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025.

*Steen, Shannon. The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

*Stern, Travis. Ballplayers on Stage: Baseball, Melodrama, and Theatrical Celebrity in the Deadball Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2024.

Stutterheim, Sydney. Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in Art of the 1970s and 1980s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 

Wagner, Martin. A Stage for Debate: The Political Significance of Vienna’s Burghteater, 1814-1867. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023.

Watson, Alex. Staging Systemic Violence: British Theatre 2010-2019. London: Methuen Drama, 2024.

Weiss, Naomi. Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023.

Wessel, Jane. Owning Property | Performing Ownership: Literary Property and the Eighteenth-Century British Stage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023.

Westgate, J. Chris. Rowdy Carousals: The Bowery Boy on Stage, 1848-1913. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2024.

Wooden, Isaiah Matthew. Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025.

*Wynstra, Beth. Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023.

*Young, Hershini Bhana. Falling, Floating, Flickering: Disability and Differential Movement in African Diasporic Performance. New York: New York University Press, 2023.

*Zhulina, Alisa. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024.