I am a cultural historian who specializes in U.S. performance of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My interests include formations of race, age, gender, and sexuality, and my interdisciplinary research integrates the study of theatrical, visual, material, and literary culture.

An Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature at Harvard University, I have published three books, most recently a solo-edited anthology titled Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press). My other books include Generation Q, a co-edited collection of essays by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered youth; and Terrible, Terrible!, a children's book.

I am currently finishing my fourth book, Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the New Negro Movement. This book is a cultural history of the intersection of ideas about childhood and race in the US in the second half of the long nineteenth century.

This website contains my c.v. and syllabi for courses I've taught, as well as a virtual library of useful full-length texts available on the Web. My links page organizes a huge number of websites of relevance to the study of US cultural history, with special emphases on performance, literature, and visual art, as well as gender, race, sexuality, and childhood.