Alums

Ricardo Rocha (MA, PhD, 2019)
Adjunct Professor of Theatre, Film, and Literature at CSUDH and UCR. 

Dissertation: “Colonizing and Decolonizing Latinidad with American Theatre” (Advisor, Daphne Lei)
Recent Publication: "Greasers, Bandidos, and Squatters Under Duress, Containing Latinidad in Mid-Nineteenth-Century California" (Theatre Survey, forthcoming). 
 

Anna Winget (MFA, PhD, 2019)
Lecturer in Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University and a researcher with RFSL Newcomers (Sweden)

Dissertation: “Trans-Healing in Activist Performance” (Advisor: Emily Roxworthy, UCSD) 
Recent Publication: Co-editor with Tiina Rosenberg and Sandra D'Urso, "Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Feminisms in Contemporary Performance" (forthcoming)
 

Dissertation: "Untimed: Transversal Subjects and Temporality in Shakespeare” (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds)

Dissertation: "And all is semblative a woman's part': Phenomenology and Gender in Early Modern English Drama” (Advisor: Ian Munro)

Leticia C. Garcia (MA, PhD, 2018)

President's Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara
Dissertation: “Shakespeare: Made in México” (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds)
Recent Publication: “The México of Romeo and Juliet” in Romeo and Juliet in Diaspora: Shakespeare Among the Arts and in Translation." Eds. Julia Reinhard Lupton and Ariane Helou (Bloomsbury, Arden Shakespeare, forthcoming 2021). 
 

Dissertation: "Pleading the Fifth Element: Disaesthetics and Hip Hop as Black Study" (Advisor: Frank B. Wilderson, III)

Allison Rotstein (2017)
Dissertation: "Survival Anxieties, Stage Fright and Traumatic Performance in the Final Days of Holocaust Testimony" (Advisor: Tony Kubiak)

Guy Zimmerman (2016) 
Instructor in Performance Studies,  CalArts and CalPoly Pomona
 
Dissertation: “Notes from a Fugitive City: Situated Theatre in Neoliberal Los Angeles” (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds)
Recent Publications: “In the Furnace of Disorientation: Tragic Drama and the Liturgical Force of Metal,” Architecture in the Age of the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press).
“The Captain in LA: Reza Abdoh’s Bricolage and the Rise of Neoliberalism,” Theatre Journal, Spring 2017
“Playing with Fluid-Space: Site-Specific Placement and the Techno-pharmacology of Maria Irene Fornés's Mud,” SubStance, 2016
“Performing Counter-Sorcery: Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body,” Shakespeare Bulletin 2015.

Lauren McCue-Bryx (2015)
Professor of Theatre at Merced College 
Certified Online Teaching and Learning Professor

Dissertation:  "Feminist Views of the Fallen Woman: From Hrotsvit of Gandersheim to Rebecca Prichard" (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds)
Other Achievements: Director, Radium Girls by D.W. Gregory (Merced College Theater, 2019); It’s Just Intermission (devised production, 2020); Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles, Trans. Marianne McDonald (Merced College Theater, 2021); The Sound of Music (Merced College Theater, postponed until Spring 2022); serves on the Board of Directors for Merced Shakespearefest.

Kate Stone (2015)
Assistant Professor of Dramatic Arts, San Diego City College

Dissertation: "Passion, Purity and Patriotism: Melodrama and the Evangelical Divide" (Advisor: Tony Kubiak, 2015)

Patrice Amon (2014)
Assistant Professor, California State University San Marcos; Associate Artistic Director, San Diego Repertory Theatre

Dissertation: “Little Girls and Legal Defendants: Theatricalization and Performances of Innocence in Modern American Culture” (Advisor: Stephen Barker)

Recent Creative & Published Works: “The Royal Theatre Presents: Performances of Melodrama in Disneyland Park,” Disney Performance Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan. 2019); Director, Nana’s Theatre Spectacular, Su Teatro, Moxie Theatre, Zoom Fest; Director, Extreme Home Makeover, by Makasha Copeland, Theatre Lab; Director, Ich Bin Ein Berliner, by Vanessa Garcia, Theatre Lab; Director, Mojada, by Luis Alfaro, UCSD; Director and Producer, The Cucuy Will Find You by Jaymes Sanchez, San Diego REP Latinx New Play Festival, 2020; Director and Playwright, A Zoom of One’s Own, CSUSM; Director, Saints Go Marching, by Matt Barbot, Milagro Theatre’s INGENIO Festival.

Kristin Keating (2014)
Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University-Fullerton

Dissertation: "The Performative Corpse: Anatomy Theatres from the Medieval Era to the Virtual Age" (Advisor: Anthony Kubiak, 2014)
Recent Publications: “A World of (No) Wonder, or No Wonder-wounded Hearers Here: Toward a Theory on the Vanishing Mediation of ‘No Wonder’ in Shakespeare’s Theater," co-authored with Bryan Reynolds, Wonder in Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.
Other Achievements: Chancellor’s Club Fellowship, University of California, Irvine (2013-2014); University Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of California, Irvine (2013); University Pedagogical Fellow, University of California, Irvine (2012-2013)

Daniel L. Keegan (2013)
MSW Candidate, Joint Programs in Social Work, North Carolina A&T State University & UNC-Greensboro (2022)

Dissertation: "The Prophetic Stage: Constituting Performance In and After Shakespeare" (Advisor:  Bryan Reynolds, 2013).
Recent Positions and Publications: Assistant Professor of English, The American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2016-2019); “Indigested in the Scenes: Hamlet’s Dramatic Theory and Ours,” PMLA 133.1 (January 2018), 71-87. 

Li-Wen "Joy" Wang (2013)
Adjunct Assistant Professor in Department of Drama and Theater, National Taiwan University.

Dissertation: "Politicizing Nostalgia: Cold War Theater in Taiwan and the US from the 1950s to the 1960s" (Advisor: Daphne P. Lei, 2013).
Recent Publications: "Beyond Political Propaganda: Performing Anti-communist Nostalgia in the 1950s' Taiwan" in Theatre History Studies 34 (2014).

Jaye Austin Williams (2013)
Asst. Professor and C. Graydon and Mary E. Rogers Faculty Fellow in Africana Studies,  Bucknell University

Dissertation: "Solving for X: The Allegorhythms of Black Feminist Playwriting" (Advisor: Frank Wilderson, 2013)
Other Achievements and Positions: After working in the professional theatre for thirty years as an acclaimed director, playwright, actor and consultant, she earned a MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 
Forthcoming Publications: “The Always Already of Antiblackness: An Interview,” (Edition Assemblage); and “Alienated Flesh at the Place of Trauma and Death: Unearthing the Black (Queered) Un-Human in Suzan-Lori Parks’ One-Character Short Play, Pickling” (Palgrave Macmillan); Staging (Within) Violence: Toward a Black Radical Dramaturgy; Kia Corthron in Concert: Selected Plays and Critical Engagements.

Adam Bryx (2012)
Dissertation: “Pirate Streams: Informatics, Transversality, Passports, and Performance in Early Modern England” (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds, 2012)

Daniel Moorhead (2012)
Lecturer in theater history & criticism for the Department of Fine Arts at Rutgers University, Camden

Dissertation: "Curtains, Islands, and Intervals: On the Ontology of Concealment and Revelation within Theater, Performance, and Subjectivity" (Advisor: Tony Kubiak, 2012)

Rebecca Johannsen (2010)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Speech and Communication at Mercy College, NY
Adjunct Instructor at Theatre Studies at NYU

Dissertation: "Sacred Death: Rewriting Women's Theatrical Suicide" (Advisor: Tony Kubiak, 2010)

Paul Backer (2009)
Associate Professor of Theatre Practice
Director of Undergraduate Voice and Movement
School of Dramatic Arts, DRC
University of Southern California

Dissertation: "Shakespeare, Alchemy and Dao (Tao): The Inner Alchemical Theatre" (Advisor: Bryan Reynolds, 2009)
Other Achievements: Directed 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, Fefu and Her Friends by Maria Irene Fornes and 12 Ophelias by Caridad Svich at USC.

Taehyung Kim (2009)
Assistant Professor, American Studies, Keimyung University, South Korea

Dissertation: “Performing Victimhood in Asian American Drama” (Advisor: Daphne Lei, 2009).
Recent Publications: Incompatible Suffering:  Performing Victimhood in Asian American Drama (VDM Verlag, 2010); “Historicizing Orature: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s Popular Theatre in I Will Marry When I Want” The Comparative Study of World Literature, Sep. 2014; “A Study of American Political Plays after 9/11: Witnessing Biopolitics through Documentary Drama” Journal of American Studies, Sep. 2014.
Other Achievements: National Research Foundation of Korea: Young researchers Grant, 2013 and 2014; National Research Foundation of Korea: Next-Generation Academic Researchers Grant, 2011

Karen O'Brien (2009)
Assistant Professor and David G. Frey Fellow in Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC)

Dissertation: “Approaching the Human/Spirit Nexus: The Crisis and Promise of (Post)Secular Millennialism in the Fin-de-millénaire Plays of Marina Carr and Conor McPherson” (Advisor: Marianne McDonald, 2009).
Recent Publications: Essays in Journal of Dramatic Criticism and Theory, Contemporary Literary Criticism; 'Out of Earth': Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts (Cork University Press, 2010); and The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh, Études Irlandaises and in Theatre Journal.
Other Achievements: Mellon Book Workshop sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.

Cipriana Petre (2008)
Dissertation: "Twice-mapping Romania: Towards a performative gridding of politics and a political cartography of theatre in communism and post-communism" (Advisor:  Bryan Reynolds, 2008)

Janna Segal (2008)
Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Louisville

Recent Publications: “Reframing Shakespeare’s Taming to Rally for Political Change” in Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy (2020); “Re‘claiming from the female’ Shakespeare’s Henry V (1.2.97)” in Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen (2020); “‘in this borrow’d likeness’ (4.1.104): Casting, Race, and Religion in Early Modern and Contemporary American Productions of Romeo and Juliet” in SDC Journal (2019); and “The Mechanicals’ Court Theatre Response to the Public Theatre Debate in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Performances at Court in the Age of Shakespeare (2019).

Recent Creative Work: Dramaturg for StageOne Family Theatre’s Theatre for Everywhere series (2020-21); Dramaturg for Henry V at the Commonwealth Theatre Center (2019); Resident Dramaturg for the Comparative Drama Conference’s Staged Reading Series (2013-Present)

Greg Ungar (2008)
Associate Professor, University of Denver Department of Theatre
Associate Artistic Director, New Swan Shakespeare Festival, UC Irvine

Dissertation: "Ancient, Vicious, Luscious: Secrecy in Western Drama" (Advisor: Marianne McDonald, 2008)