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Tracy C. Davis
Professor, Ethel M. Barber Professor of Performing Arts
tcdavis@northwestern.edu
Tracy C. Davis specializes in the historiography methodologies of theatre and performance research, 19th-century theatre history, economics and business history of theatre, performance theory, gender and theatre, museum studies, and Cold War studies. She has published a dozen books and over 100 articles in journals dedicated to the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She is the Theatre Department’s Mentoring Champion and has provided trainings for faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to improve mentoring skill, at Northwestern and at universities across the globe. Two books are forthcoming: Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform and The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies (both with Cambridge UP).
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Jesse Rosenberg
Clinical Associate Professor of Musicology
j-rosenberg1@northwestern.edu
Jesse Rosenberg is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Italian opera, with articles published on Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi and papers read at national and international conferences on opera and film music history. His research interests include musical aesthetics and the convergence of music with fields such as literature, poetry, and theology. Rosenberg is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (Macmillan, 1992), Pipers Enzyclopädie des Musiktheaters (Pipers, 1996), and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Macmillan, 2000). He received the Outstanding Dissertation Award and Excellence in Teaching Award from New York University and is on the Faculty Honor Roll at Northwestern University.
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Ivy Wilson
Associate Professor of English and American Studies
Director, Black Arts Consortium
i-wilson@northwestern.edu
Ivy Wilson teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes edited volumes on James Monroe Whitfield, Albery Allson Whitman, Walt Whitman, and on the emergent scholarship in American literary and cultural studies of the “long” nineteenth century. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national.
Caroline Gleason-Mercier, Ph.D.
Caroline Gleason-Mercier
Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow
caroline.gleasonmercier@gmail.com
Caroline Gleason-Mercier is a specialist in French women-composed opera of the eighteenth century. She recently completed her Ph.D. (King’s College London, 2023) pursuing research which explores the political significance of women-composed opera on the Parisian stage during the French Revolution (1789-1799). Her research interests include women composers and gender politics, broadly conceived, and representations of gender, race, and class through rediscovering the cultural histories of eighteenth-century performance, staging, and costuming. Her current work focuses on the export of opéra-comique to the United States of America through Maryland’s first woman composer, Charlotte Le Pelletier (1778-1855) and her Journal de Musick (1810). This postcolonial study seeks to rediscover the Journal’s popularity among upper-class women as the means to understand how French sensitivities served to sophisticate and “civilize” colonial America.
Caroline is a sought-after opera singer and public speaker on women creators of opera, bringing together her love of performing with her passion for discussing gender, race, and class in musical works. With a background as an award-winning soprano, Caroline has performed in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, and France. In addition to presenting guest lectures and papers at institutions and conferences internationally, she has been recognized for her contribution to the fields of music academia and opera performance, including receiving the Adam Prize in Music (King’s College London, 2018) and numerous First Place and Most Promising Singer awards (National Association of Teachers of Singing, 2013 to 2017).
Keary Watts, Ph.D.
Keary Watts
Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow
skearywatts@gmail.com
Keary is a graduate of Northwestern’s Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama (IPTD). He researches and writes about race and performance historiography with expertise in Black theatre in the United States from 1800 to the present; theatre criticism and dramatic theory; nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy; African postcolonial drama since 1945; modern and contemporary US theatre; as well as directing and dramaturgy. His dissertation developed the concept of “strategic re-deployment” to theorize how Black theatre artists such as Amiri Baraka, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (among others) use nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions to challenge white supremacy. His current book project theorizes the significance of “strategic re-deployment” for the evolving performance theory and practice of the Black Arts Movement.