Jill Dolan

Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and heads the MA/PhD program in performance as pubic practice with an emphasis on performance as public practice. She was inducted into UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in Fall 2006. Her most recent book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, is available from University of Michigan Press (2005). She is the author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Michigan); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan), which has been translated into Korean. Prof. Dolan has written numerous articles and essays on feminist and lesbian performance, on performance studies, and on arts advocacy, democracy, and social change. Samples of her essays include “Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto,” in Staging International Feminisms, eds. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (Palgrave, 2007, forthcoming), 212-221; “Utopia in Performance,” Theatre Research International 31.2 (July 2006), 163-173; the “Foreword” to Cast Out: Queer Lives in the Theater, ed. Robin Bernstein, Triangulations Series (University of Michigan Press, 2006), v-xii; “Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.3 (2006), 491-506; “The Polemics and Potential of Theatre Studies and Performance,” Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, eds. Judith Hamera and D. Soyina Madison (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 2006), 508-526; and “Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and Civic Engagement in Theatre and Performance Studies,” Theatre Topics 11:1 (March 2001), 1-17. Her book on performance and utopia allows her to pose such questions as, “Does live performance remain a site at which utopia can be imagined and perhaps even experienced, affectively, through fantasy and “communitas’?” Prof. Dolan’s next book project is a critical memoir called From Flannel to Fleece: A Lesbian of a Certain Age, which addresses the move from lesbian feminist to queer in activist and cultural politics, with performance as a major theme. She is also co-editing a collection of plays by and interviews with performance artist Peggy Shaw. Her upcoming projects include an article rethinking feminist criticism through the plays of Wendy Wasserstein; a book-length project on Wasserstein’s work; a book-length essay on theatre and sexuality; an essay on ethics and pedagogy; and an essay on the history of Women & Performance Journal, of which she was one of the founders in 1981. Prof. Dolan is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and a past president of the Women and Theatre Program, also of ATHE. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she taught for five years in the PhD Program in Theatre. During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Prof. Dolan won the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching, and has also won a College of Fine Arts teaching award at the University of Texas at Austin. Graduate courses she has recently taught at UT include “Writing about Performance,” a graduate seminar focused on arts criticism for a larger public audience, and “Queer Performance and Theory,” “Gender/Sexuality/Race: Text and Performance,” “Public Intellectuals in the Arts,” “Feminist Theory and Performance,” and “Performance Studies/Performance Art.” She also teaches the department’s teaching practicum, “Supervised Teaching in Drama.” Prof. Dolan’s blog, “The Feminist Spectator,” can be accessed at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. Her online essay on The L Word can be accessed at http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=744. She holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University.