2023 Faculty Publishing Achievements

This is our second feature about UB Theatre and Dance faculty research publishing in academic journals and books in 2023, which was a busy year. Congratulations once more to our talented faculty. We look forward to what’s in store in 2024.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Kellen Hoxworth, PhD, had a prolific year of publication, including “Fin-de-siècle Black Minstrelsy, Itinerancy, and the Anglophone Imperial Circuit” in The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook on Theatre and Migration, edited by Yana Meerzon and S.E. Wilmer, 675-686. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. From the Abstract: “Following the end of the US American Civil War, African American performers established themselves as popular rivals to leading white companies of blackface minstrelsy. Yet, the circuits of Black minstrelsy were not limited to the United States but rather traced itinerant routes throughout the British Empire. This Anglophone imperial circuit encompassed not only Britain but also the British colonies in southern Africa, South Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. For instance, in 1899, two Black minstrel troupes competed for audiences in Sydney, Australia: Ernest Hogan’s American Negro Minstrels and Orpheus McAdoo’s Georgia Minstrels. Their overlapping itineraries trace the forgotten global routes of Black minstrelsy, the complex racial politics of late nineteenth-century transnational Black performance, and the integral role played by African American performers in the earliest waves of theatrical globalization.”

Hoxworth’s other work included “Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo” in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism, edited by Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, 445-452. London: Routledge, 2023; “Mojisola Adebayo” also in The Routledge Anthology, 493-499. London: Routledge, 2023; as well as “The Invented Choreographies of the Tomahawk Chop” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jen Atkins, 23-26. London: Routledge, 2023.

Assistant Professor of Dance Rebecca Chaleff, PhD, wrote “Economies of Reperformance: Unearthing Racial Capitalism in Dancing at Dusk” for TDR: The Drama Review 67, no. 1 (2023): 167-185. From the Abstract: “As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online.

Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.”

Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre Janet Werther, MFA, contributed the chapter “A-List Drag Queens, Accidental Drag Kings, and Illegible Gender Rebels: (Mis)Representations of Trans Experience in Contemporary Musicals” to the book Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre: He/She/They Could Have Danced All Night, edited by Kelly Kessler. Bristol, UK: Intellect Publishing, Ltd., 2023. From the summary: “Established and emerging musical theater scholars wrestle with the complexities of the gendered and sexualized musical theater form. Critics and fans alike often mistake theatrical song and dance as simplistic, heteronormative, and traditional. This collection troubles this over-idealized notion of musical theatre, tackling divas, chorus boys, and the Rockettes; hit shows such as Hamilton and Spring Awakening; and lesser-known but groundbreaking gems like Erin Markey’s A Ride on The Irish Cream and Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale.

“The book takes a broad look at musical theater across a range of intersecting lenses including race, nation, form, dance, casting, marketing, pedagogy, industry, stardom, politics, and platform. Undermining the musical form’s conservative façade, scholars drive home the fact that gender and desire have long been at the heart of the musical. This exciting and vibrant collection of articles takes sex, sexuality, and gendered complexity out of the musical’s liner notes and back above the marquee.”