Graduate Student Bios
Meghan Brodie is currently working on her dissertation, investigating
lesbianism on Broadway from 1920 to 1945. Meghan's concentrations include political
theatre, Holocaust drama, dramatic adaptation, and feminist and lesbian drama.
At Cornell, she has taught "Has Breasts, Does Write: Women Writing Women; Butches,
Bitches, & Buggers: An Exploration of 20th-Century Drama"; and "Text/Theatricality:
Perspectives on Adaptation" (co-taught with Beth Milles) among other courses.
At Colgate University, Meghan has taught Acting I and Performance II.
Lindsay Cummings is a PhD candidate whose research interests include theatre for social change, social protest, affect theory, and gender and queer theory in 20th and 21st century theatre in the Americas. She holds a BA and MA from Ohio University, and has worked in the literary and education departments at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Portland Stage Company. At Cornell, she has designed and taught First-Year Writing Seminars for the Knight Institute titled “Staging America: Image, Myth, and Society,” “The Politics of Documentary Theatre,” and “Southern Stages: Theatre, Performance, and Regional Identity.” Her dissertation explores empathy in theatre for social change.
Jen-Hao Hsu (Walter) got a BA in English literature and a MA in Theatre Arts from National Taiwan University. After working as a research assistant in the field of modern Chinese literature and culture at Academia Sinica in Taipei, he moved to University of Califormia, Los Angeles to pursue a Phd degree in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. He transferred to Cornell to continue his Phd studies in August, 2008. He is interested in the intersectionality between national identity, gender, race, queerness and postcoloniality, particularly in the Sinophone contexts. His current research project looks at sinophone theatrical/cinematic representations of history, analyzing the correlation between performacne of cultural memories and geo-political shifting in the Trans-Pacific context.
Ryan Platt holds a B.A. in French Studies and Theatre & Dance from Amherst College. As a 2007-8 DAAD Research Grant recipient, he pursued doctoral research in Berlin, which he is continuing during the 2009-10 academic year. In Germany, he has become especially invested in William Forsythe and Heiner Goebbels, whose work he intends to integrate into his dissertation's ongoing articulation of a cinematic mode of performance as exemplified by interdisciplinary female artists of the 1970s. Such commitment to theatre history and interdisciplinary study likewise characterized his two most recently designed courses at Cornell, "Mourning Representation: The Aesthetics of AIDS" and "Literary Bodies, Literal Bodies." His web presence is located at http://ryanplatt.net.
Stephen Ponton’s research focuses on audience response
and spectatorship -- primarily in the English Renaissance theatre, secondarily
in medieval theatre and in film. His work draws on a combination of historical
scholarship and a range of theoretical tools that includes Brecht, performance
theory, and Girard. In addition, Stephen is the founder and director of the
Shakespeare production series held each summer at Cornell Plantations. Series
productions he has directed include Antony and Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of
Windsor, and Richard III.
Sarah Powers received her B.A. in Classics and Theatre Studies from Emory University, then worked as an intern in dramaturgy and literary management at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. She is now a doctoral candidate at Cornell, and her research interests include Ancient Greek and Roman theater and studies of spectatorship, particularly as related to comedy. She has taught several first-year writing seminars for the Knight Institute, including "Master of Mayhem: The Classic Trickster figure in Comedy" and "In on the Act: The Spectator's Role in Comedy."
Chunyen Wang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Theater, Film and Dance. In Taiwan he received his B.A. in Chinese Literature and M.A. in Drama and Theater both from National Taiwan University. Concerned with modern Chinese diaspora in Taiwan, he worked on theater as cultural representation. After the first three year doctorate study at the University of California at Los Angeles, he continues his Ph.D. at Cornell University. His current interests include critical theory, (post-) colonial studies, and performances studies on folk and populace in transnational contexts with a focus on Japanese colonial Taiwan.
Jennifer Williams is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance. She holds an A.B. with honors in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include opera, the plays of Heiner Müller, Weimar culture, and cultural theory. Through Cornell University's Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, she has taught the freshman writing seminars "Women on the Musical Stage and Screen" and "Technology and Live Performance." At Wells College, she taught a seminar on Shakespeare and adaptation. Her publications have appeared in The Journal of Religion and Theatre and Women in German (forthcoming, 2010). She has worked as an assistant director with Opera North, Wolf Trap Opera Company, Chicago Opera Theater, and Chicago's Court Theatre.
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