Assistant Professor of Theatre and Director of Graduate Studies Kellen Hoxworth, PhD, has received Honorable Mention from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) for his article "Alice Childress's Troubling Method: Theatrical 'Truth' and the Cold War Politics of Rehearsing Racial Authenticity” in Theatre Journal. ATHE’s 2026 Award for Outstanding Article acknowledges scholarship marked by methodological sophistication, complex and critical engagement with dramatic texts and performances, focused inquiries, and possible directions for future scholarship. https://www.athe.org/page/articleawardees

Hoxworth’s essay analyzes Alice Childress’s artistic and political investments in Stanislavskian approaches to acting such as the “Method” as means for expanding Black agency in US theatre during the Cold War. Childress’s play “Trouble in Mind” and her theatrical manifesto “For a Negro Theatre” offer insight into her critical attention to the processes of theatrical production and to the rehearsal room as a site of artistic labor. Attending to Childress’s work amid its recent renaissance invites a reassessment of the politics of Black theatrical authenticity in the long shadow of the Cold War and its enduring orders of racial liberalism. Read it here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/962836

Hoxworth’s academic interests focus on the intersections between performance, race, and coloniality, particularly in African and Black diasporic 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.

Photo: A scene from the 1955 premiere production of “Trouble in Mind” at the Greenwich Mews Theatre, featuring (from left to right): Hilda Haynes (Millie Davis), James McMahon (Al Manners), Stephanie Elliot (Judy Sears), and Charles Bettis (John Nevins). Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.