I investigate how we make places livable, working through history and memory to understand precarity and community survival.
My research uses performance as both method and subject to explicate how memory forges our understanding of place. I take a geographic approach that allows for diverse sites of research (plays, museums, public spaces, political rallies, etc.) to understand the ways in which different groups manipulate public memory. While my research process typically involves archival research, many of the histories I explore are excluded from traditional archives. To work through these omissions I turn to interviews, oral histories, performance reconstructions, and embodied experiences to understand the ways the past shapes and lives on in the present.
I am particularly interested in environmental justice, community survivance, urban culture, and placemaking practices. Although I have researched internationally, I most frequently write on the US Gulf Coast where I grew up and currently live.
Scroll down for links to my written scholarship and research conversations I’ve taken part in. Click here for my CV.
My most recent article is in the April 2023 volume of Performance Research. It explores Junebug Theatre's 2009 Homecoming Project, a community-based theatre project that responded to the ongoing social problems caused by Hurricane Katrina.
A recent conversation I led with environmental artists and scholars Una Chaudhuri, Kathy Randels, and Beth Osnes.
A conversation I moderated with local environmental justice leaders in Houston.
My co-author, Gary Alan Fine, and I were interviewed by Richard Schechner, editor of TDR: The Drama Review, for our publication exploring the performance of populism in the US South.
Read my article (co-authored with Gary Alan Fine) on the performance of populism in the Southern US.
My first publication, which explored Jewish playwright Arthur Schnitzler's political drama in early 1900s Vienna.