Jill Dolan

Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor in English, Professor of English and Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008. She was inducted into UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in Fall 2006, after winning a College of Fine Arts teaching award earlier in her UT career. During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from 1988-1994, Prof. Dolan won the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2009, she was inaugurated into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

Prof. Dolan’s most recent book, Theatre & Sexuality, is available from Palgrave Macmillan (2010). She is the author of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 2005); Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Michigan, 1993); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan, 1991), which has been translated into Korean.

Dolan’s blog on which she writes regularly about recent theatre, performance, film, television, and novels, can be accessed at “The Feminist Spectator.” She has written numerous articles and essays on feminist and lesbian theatre and performance, on performance studies, and on arts advocacy, democracy, and social change. Among her most recent pieces include “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal 60.3 (October 2008): 433-457; “Seeing Deb Margolin: Ontological Vandalism and Radical Amazement,” introduction to Deb Margolin’s Index to Idioms and “A Slave to Synaesthesia,” an interview with Margolin in TDR: The Drama Review 52:3 (Winter 2008, T199): 98 – 117; “Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto,” in Staging International Feminisms, eds. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (Palgrave, 2007), 212-221; and “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.

Dolan has also edited Menopausal Gentleman: Plays and Performances by Peggy Shaw, for the University of Michigan Press’s Triangulations: Drama/Theatre/Performance series (forthcoming 2010). The book collects Shaw’s performances You’re Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentleman, To My Chagrin, and Must, along with other writing by Shaw, and an introduction by Dolan.

Her current book projects include a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein; a critical history of US lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s and 1980s; and a history of LGBTQ theatre in the US since 1960.

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 in the PhD Program in Theatre from 1994-1999.

Dolan holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University. Her interests include theatre and drama; performance studies; women’s and feminist studies; LGBTQ studies; American studies; cultural studies and public intellectuals and the arts.