Harry Ransom Center

Though Henry Blake Fuller’s 1896 publication of The Puppet Booth is largely forgotten, one of the plays in the anthology has come to be recognized as one of the first to be written in the United States with a homosexual theme. The play – At Saint Judas’s – begins moments before a wedding. As the drama unfolds, we learn that the Best Man has secretly been trying to sabotage the wedding out of a deep love for the Bridegroom. Yet, despite references to sharing each other’s clothes and an ambiguously (a)sexual bed, the extent to which their love has or hasn’t been consummated remains a mystery.

The crumbling, handwritten manuscript of the play resides at the Newberry Library in Fuller’s native Chicago. An analysis of the manuscript – the visible erasures, the inserted slips of dialogue, the dramatic alterations to the published text – reveals the author’s intentional ambivalence in dealing with the theme of same-sex sexuality. Yet, in examining my own position as a performance historian/archivist/ detective, this essay suggests that reading too far into Fuller’s ambivalence reveals more about our contemporary desires to lay claim to a gay past than it does about late-19th century homosexuality in the United States.

Macalester College: Fall, 2014.
Introductory course in Theatre and Dance department for majors and non-majors, with a department expectation that the class will be one of the primary courses that will teach play texts. Second half of semester focuses on the development of a new play - written individually by students, but developed in collaboration with peers.

University of Minnesota: Spring, 2010. Special topics course examining representations of homosexuality on the American stage, with diversions to dance halls, pride parades, bathhouses, and more. Syllabus was re-developed in 2014 for a course on Queer Performance Theory and Practice at Macalester College.

Macalester College: Spring, 2014. Special topics course that looks at musicals within the context of representing American identity in history. Each musical studied becomes a way of unpacking how Americans saw or wanted to see themselves in a particular moment. This course was revised and expanded in Spring, 2015 at Macalester College and was also redeveloped for the Fall of 2014 as a First Year writing course.

Grounded in the archive of 1960s performance artist Jack Smith, this chapter theorizes the possibilities of approaching a queer archive as a space of productive and radical disorientation. This is chapter four of my doctoral dissertation on LGBT and Queer archiving, defended at the University of Minnesota in October, 2014.

Macalester College: Spring, 2015. For over a century, museums and historical sites have used live performance as a method of interpretation to engage, educate, and entertain the public. Sometimes called “living history,” this kind of performance has been called a “simulation of life during another time” (Anderson), “a form of theatre in which participants use performance to create a world, tell a story, entertain, and teach lessons” (Magelssen), and “a history that does work in the world and influences the course of history” (Becker).

In recent years, more and more museums have turned to performance as a way of telling their particular story – nationally at places like Colonial Williamsburg and Plimouth Plantation, or locally at places like Historic Fort Snelling and the James J. Hill House.

In this course, we will be working directly with the James J. Hill House and Minnesota Historical Society to develop an interpretative program that will be presented by the class participants at the end of the term. Just down the street from the Macalester campus, the Hill mansion housed the great railroad barron and his family at the turn of the last century. As the “Downton Abbey” of Saint Paul, the large family lived comfortably upstairs entertaining the highest members of society including the President of the United States, while their team of servants downstairs – cooks, gardeners, maids, housekeepers, etc. – worked to keep the estate running.
Students will immerse themselves in the history, culture, and politics of turn-of-the-century Saint Paul, grappling with contemporary issues of gender, class, race and sexuality. Through class discussions, guest historians, site visits and archival research, students will construct ‘characters’ they will then perform to interpret an aspect of the life and times of this historic house. While the work of this class is located within a particular historic time period and physical site, the skills developed will be useful to any student interested in history, performance, museum studies, American studies, and civic engagement.

The universalizing rhetoric of gender claimed to embrace all women when in fact it derived from the standpoint of middle class white women in North America or Northern Europe' (L M Alexander 2004). Discuss the development of women's history to include a variety of female experience in North America and Europe.

The archetypal patrons of monastic art and architecture in the Middle Ages are lay women and men whose donations were in aid of their own spiritual well-being and that of their relatives, and rarely do we consider nuns who themselves commissioned works out of their own private wealth. This paper highlights the less-studied practice of artistic patronage by nuns by examining a remarkable illuminated manuscript, Le Traité de la vanité des choses mondaines, (“Treatise on the vanity of worldly things”), commissioned by Jehanne Girand (d. 1468), abbess of the female Franciscan abbey of Longchamp, located just west of Paris in the Bois de Boulogne. Produced in 1466 for the private use of the abbess, the manuscript features nineteen richly decorated images depicting Jeanne in dialogue with the treatise’s author, the friar Jean Barthélemy, within the architecturally specific spaces of her abbey, accompanied by scenes of the outside world—inaccessible to a cloistered nun—described in the text. I present this work, with its rich layering of images: the patron, who is both subject and intended reader, is depicted in her cloistered space next to the author, her teacher, and the choses mondaines. I argue that these layers of meaning result in a dynamic, multisensory devotional tool in which the abbess plays an active role of both humble nun and supplicant to spiritual instruction and privileged patron.