Stacy Wolf is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has published articles on theatre spectatorship, performance pedagogy, and musical theatre in many journals, including Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and Women and Performance. She was the editor of Theatre Topics in 2001-2003.
Wolf holds a B.A. in English from Yale and an M.A. in Drama from the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation, Theatre as Social Practice: Local Ethnographies of Audience Reception, uses reception theories and methods from theatre and performance studies, literary, film, and tv studies, anthropology, and sociology to explore the complex and contradictory ways that audiences make use of theatre.
Wolf's current work expands her interest in performances of gender and sexuality in the American Broadway musical. Recent publications include "'Something Better than This': Sweet Charity and the Feminist Utopia of Broadway Musicals" in Modern Drama (Summer 2004); and "'We'll Always Be Bosom Buddies': Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theatre" in GLQ (2006), which won the year’s award for Best Essay in Theatre Studies from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Forthcoming publications are an essay on the musical Wicked and its girl fans in Camera Obscura and an essay about Wicked’s queerness in Theatre Journal. Projects in progress include an article on dinner theatre and middlebrow culture; a biography of Mary Martin; and a monograph titled, Defying Gravity: How Women and Girls Feminized, Queered, and Radicalized Broadway Musical Theatre.
Wolf teaches courses in musical theatre history, dramaturgy, dramatic literature and play analysis, performance theory, and reception theories. Wolf also teaches in Plan II and serves as the advisor to student dramaturgs on productions at UT and in Austin's community and professional theatres
