Faculty Profiles

I am a theater and performance scholar working across critical theory, politics and aesthetics, performance studies, and modern drama; my research considers the politics of embodiment and the theater of public life in the twentieth century and today. I have a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University, where I held a Deans’ Faculty Fellowship before coming to Rutgers. I teach courses on dramatic literature, performance, media, culture, and theory.

I work at the intersection of two critical frames in theater and performance studies: one that interprets the world (and its acts, signs, texts) as performance, and another that uses theater as a means of dialectical theory. My work also takes up the embodiment of racial and sexual difference; carcerality, totalitarianism, and surveillance; and the interplay of state/social subjection and mass media. Currently, I am writing a book on how gestures prepare bodies to participate in systems of control in the United States today. Using theatrical gesture as a model for reading movement in the everyday, I argue that gestures work as embodied scripts, reproducing histories we do not recognize and might otherwise disavow.

I am also a stage director, with an interdisciplinary practice and ongoing collaborations in new work devising (talleymurphy.com). In the past, I have worked as a development, production, and institutional dramaturg. I also make critical and experimental video.