Comparative early modern and modern drama

Professor Buckley specializes in comparative early modern and modern theatre and drama, with a particular emphasis on the drama’s relation to the history of modern mass culture, media, visuality, and time.  His publications include Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Johns Hopkins, 2006), as well as articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Victorian Studies, Studies in Romanticism and elsewhere.  

For the past decade, his work has focused on the origins and early development of stage melodrama and on the broad implications of melodrama’s extended, multi-medial, trans-cultural history.  In 2012, he edited a special issue of Modern Drama (55:4) devoted to recent international scholarship on melodrama on stage, film, and television; in 2013, he founded the Melodrama Research Consortium, a global network of over 125 melodrama scholars working across the humanities and the arts, to foster, organize, and facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary research on the topic (www.melodramaresearchconsortium.org).  His current research projects include the Digital Database of 19^th-Century British Melodrama, begun in 2008, which now includes more than 10,000 entries and is currently being used to generate the first historical atlas of British stage melodrama’s emergence and growth, and the Melodrama Database Project, an international, interdisciplinary effort, begun in 2013 and now including more than three dozen scholars, to design and construct a digital database of the global history of stage, film, television, and new media melodrama. 

Professor Buckley is currently the director of the Melodrama Research Consortium and the Melodrama Database Project and the chief editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Melodrama, a comprehensive guide to melodrama scholarship planned for publication in 2018. His current book projects include Becoming Melodramatic, which explores melodrama’s historical formation, examines its formal development and cultural impact, and assesses that history’s challenge to our understanding of both melodrama and narrative culture in modernity, and Place of Seeing, a re-examination of major works in the history of Western theatre iconography.

• Introduction to Dramatic Literature
• Restoration and 18^th-Century Drama
• City, Stage, and Court
• The Dramatic Revolution
• 19^th-Century Theater and Drama
• The Dramatic and Visual Avant-Gardes
• 20^th-Century Drama I
• 20^th-Century Drama II
• American Drama

• Theatre and Revolution
• Spectacle, Spectatorship, and the Urban Subject
• Drama and Modernity

• Rutgers University Research Council Grant (2008)
• Keats-Shelley Association Prize for best essay in the general area of the Godwin Circle and later British Romanticism (2007)
• Mellon Foundation Program Grant (2003)

• Member, Modern Language Association
• Member, American Society for Theater Research
• Member, Association for Theatre in Higher Education
• Member, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Member, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism
• Member, Modernist Studies Association

• “Making a Whore of Freedom: Büchner’s Marion Episode”
  Modern Drama 53.2, Summer 2010
• “Eloquent Action: The Body and Meaning in Early Commedia dell’Arte”
  Theatre Survey 50:2, November 2009
• “Refugee Theatre: Melodrama and Modernity's Loss”
  Theatre Journal 61: 2, May 2009
• "'A Dream of Murder’: The Fall of Robespierre and the Tragic Imagination” 
  Studies in Romanticism 44.4, Winter 2005
• "Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience" 
  Victorian Studies 44.3, Spring 2003

PhD, Columbia University
AB, Princeton University