Kellen Hoxworth
PhD
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor
Research Topics
Theatre and Performance Studies; African & Caribbean Performance; Black Theatre & Performance; Performance in/from the Global South; Dramatic Literature; Historiography; Postcolonial Theory
Education
- PhD, Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford University
- Graduate Certificate, African Studies, Stanford University
- MA, Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh
- BA, English, Washington University in St. Louis
Bio
Kellen Hoxworth (he/they) is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. His academic interests focus on the intersections between performance, race, and coloniality, particularly in African and Black diasporic theatre and performance. His first monograph Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance traces the transnational circulations of blackface minstrelsy and related forms of racialized performance from the prerevolutionary circum-Atlantic world through the nineteenth-century Anglophone imperium. Transoceanic Blackface received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. He has also edited a special issue of TDR on “Blackface Geographies.” His writing has been published in American Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR/The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. He has also published chapters in several edited volumes, including The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism, The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Theatre and Migration, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia, and Dance in US Popular Culture. His essay “Alice Childress’s Troubling Method: Theatrical Realism and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity” received Honorable Mention for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2026 Outstanding Article Award, and his essay “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman” was selected by the American Society for Theatre Research as the recipient of the 2018 Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American theatre, drama, and/or performance studies.
An affiliate of the Department of Africana and American Studies, the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Department of History, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on dramatic literature, performance history, and performance theory, including courses on his research specializations in African and Black diasporic theatre and performance and performance in/from the global south.
Book
Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race Performance (Northwestern University Press, 2024)
Journal Articles
“An Expansive ‘Us’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘Pan-Negro’ Theatrical Vision.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 38, no. 2; special issue on “100 Years of Du Bois: ‘Principles of a Real Negro Theatre’ and ‘Criteria of Negro Art’.”
“Blackface Geographies.” TDR 70, no. 1: 60-72; special section on “Blackface Geographies.” Co-authored with Douglas A. Jones.
“On the Margins of Black Minstrel History: The Georgia Minstrels and Charles B. Hicks from Macon to Melbourne.” TDR 70, no. 1: 73-94; special section on “Blackface Geographies.” Co-authored with Arminda Thomas.
“Alice Childress’s Troubling Method: Theatrical Realism and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity,” Theatre Journal, vol. 77, no. 2 (2025): 213-38.
“Performative Correctness; or, the Subject of Performance and Politics,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 36, no. 1 (2021): 107-12; special section on “#PerformativeX.”
“The Jim Crow Global South,” Theatre Journal, vol. 72, no. 4 (2020): 443-67; special issue on “Africa and the Global South.”
“Football Fantasies: Neoliberal Habitus, Racial Governmentality, and National Spectacle,” American Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1 (2020): 155-79.
“Minstrel Scandals; or, The Restorative White Properties of Blackface,” TDR, vol. 63, no. 3 (2019): 8-19.
“Strains of the Enlightenment: Making Belief in American Secularism and African Difference in The Book of Mormon,” Modern Drama, vol. 60, no. 3 (2017): 364-86; special issue on “Affect.”
"The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman,” Theatre Survey, vol. 58, no. 3 (2017): 275-99.
* Recipient of the 2018 American Society for Theatre Research Errol Hill Award
Book Chapters
“Intertheatrical Things.” Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories, eds. Eero Laine and Andrew Friedman. University of Michigan Press, 2026. 93-101.
“Fin-de-siècle Black Minstrelsy, Itinerancy, and the Anglophone Imperial Circuit.” The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Theatre and Migration, eds. Yana Meerzon and S.E. Wilmer. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 675-686.
“Racial Impressions, Capital Characters: Dave Carson Brownfaces the Empire.” Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia, eds. Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and Pamela Lothspeich. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2023. 42-64.
Brief Essays
“Authorship, Authority, Authenticity, Archive: The Case of Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind.” Theatre Journal Online 77, no. 2 (2025).
“Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo.” The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism, eds. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor. Routledge, 2023. 445-452.
“Mojisola Adebayo.” The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism, eds. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor. Routledge, 2023. 493-499.
“The Invented Choreographies of the Tomahawk Chop.” Dance in US Popular Culture, ed. Jen Atkins. Routledge, 2023. 23-26.
Reviews
Review of Rhae Lynn Barnes, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. Theatre Journal 78, no. 3 (2026): 437-38.
Review of Danielle Roper, Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Nationalist Fictions in the Americas. New West Indian Guide 100, no. 3-4 (2026): 64-65. Solicited.
Review of Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond, Theatre Research International 50, no. 1 (2025): 99-100. Solicited.
Review of Simon Gikandi and R.N. Sandberg (eds.), Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora, African Studies Review, vol. 68, no. 1: 1-2. Solicited.
Review of Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, directed by Tawiah M’Carthy, Stratford Festival, Theatre Journal, vol. 75, no. 2 (2023): 228-30.
Review of Laura L. Mielke, Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States, TDR, vol. 65, no. 1 (2021): 195-96.
Review of Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Modern Drama, vol. 61, no. 4 (2018): 591-94.
Review of Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance, Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (2018): 137-38.
Review of Stephen Johnson (ed.), Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, Theater Survey, vol. 56, no. 2 (2015): 236-38.
Review of Jon McKenzie and Ralo Mayer, “Disastronautics: How to Do Things with Worlds,” Performance Research, vol. 19, no. 3 (2014): 112-13.
RECENT FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
ATHE Outstanding Article Award Honorable Mention, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, 2026
John W. Frick Book Award Honorable Mention, American Theatre & Drama Society, 2025
HI Faculty Fellowship, Humanities Institute, University at Buffalo – SUNY, 2024-2025
Arts & Humanities Program Enhancement Grant in support of "Global Blackface, Global Minstrelsy" Symposium, Florida State University, 2021-22
First Year Assistant Professor Grant, Florida State University, 2020
Small Grants Program Project Completion Grant, Florida State University, 2019-20
Errol Hill Award, American Society for Theatre Research, 2018
Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, 2018