In the summer of 2021, as an unemployed theater and performance studies scholar and mother of a four-year-old with a partner working two full-time jobs to provide for us, I often find myself wishing to escape from my life. Specifically, as my back seizes up and my son requests me to play a third “unboxing Batman toys” Youtube video of the day, I wish to escape my body, to escape my perspective, to escape the pandemic, to escape the everything and the everywhere of the current, long, multi...

In the fall of 2018, I embarked on a grant study titled “Teaching with Liveness.” My pedagogical premise was that as theater educators, we should be using live theater as a part of our tool kit. I hired, directed, and paid actors to perform scenes from plays my classes were reading to workshop in real time and glean what liveness can do, but also to use as a learning tool that could be generalized to understand all the theater we were learning about in my theater history and script analysis...

It was a Tuesday morning in April of 2020, and I had just seen the news of Ahmaud Arbery , the young African-American male who was shot while jogging through a suburban neighborhood in Georgia. [1] I had been preparing to join my live virtual composition class, as I had every other Tuesday since in-person classes had shuttered and moved online in March. Only today, I struggled to find the words to begin class as usual, as I watched nervously to see whether my husband would make the bend to enter...

My first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, was published in the Spring of 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus hit the UK and we entered our first lockdown. Needless to say, it was not the historical season I imagined it to appear. The book is concerned with what I call late modernist chronophobia—a fear of the past and the future together—and with how individuals and the British state managed temporal anxieties in the years surrounding the...

Is there any critical concept so abused in our political culture as “emotional labor,” a term seemingly used—like mansplain— to settle scores, to end conversation? Even now, I revise myself. Yes, “wave” language in feminism is more abused, and used to banish the radical histories that produced critique within feminism. Yes, intersectionality is conceptually abused, as a defense or elision of the conservative bona fides of women politicians from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris. This wandering away from context seems part of the whole: the rendering of feminism, and feminist language, as an affective and aesthetic position. A personal brand, even.