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Over the weekend, I found myself pasting a quote from a recent article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore into my Evernote app. I didn’t want to forget it. The article was focused on how people are wrestling with telling the story of the American Revolution  for its upcoming 250 th  anniversary. But it made me pause for additional reasons. It forced me to think more deeply about teaching and learning about history. Here is the quote: Much academic history suffers from pedantry

Welcome Slide for the ASTR Conference, Denver, CO 2025 Last week I attended the ASTR (American Society for Theatre Research) Conference for the first time. It was held in Denver this year, and I’m on sabbatical to research and write a book, so I thought I better not pass up the opportunity. Let me summarize: Day One:  Ostracized Day Two:  Tolerated Day Three:  Disoriented Day Four:  Punted. Streamed movies with my husband. He made me watch Die Hard , which seemed vaguely appr

Shakespeare Image by  Gordon Johnson  from  Pixabay For today’s blog, I’ll start with a little story. A few years ago, when I was barely beginning to think about rebelling against Eurocentric theatre history textbooks, I got a big scholarly shove from a great group of students at Red Rocks Community College. We were maybe a third of the way through the semester, and I was about to launch into a new module in our Theatre Appreciation class, an overview of theatre history in th

Keenan Tyler Oliphant from Columbia University News  article by Nicole Saldarriaga Last week, I spent a lot of time looking at the job of the Director for my Theatre Appreciation open educational resource textbook. I learned that this job only emerged in the West in the nineteenth century. Before that, job duties associated with a director might have gone to an actor, a teacher, the playwright, or even an older family member. In ancient Greece, the playwright led the coordin