NCID-3309
Amy Hughes
Professor of Theatre Studies
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Education/Degree:
1 Theatre and Performance Theatre and Performance (The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY))
About
Dr. Amy E. Hughes is a Professor of Theatre & Drama (SMTD), a Faculty Associate of American Culture (LSA), and an Associate Director of U-M’s ADVANCE program. A theater historian whose research focuses on the United States during the nineteenth century, her interests include disability studies, human-animal studies, material and visual culture, digital humanities, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Her publications include "Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America" (University of Michigan Press, 2012), which explores how reformers harnessed the power of spectacle to promote or resist social change during the mid-1800s; and "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2025), which illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US entertainment culture, both in the past and the present.
Current Work
Dr. Amy E. Hughes (she/any) is an internationally recognized, award-winning teacher-scholar who studies how popular entertainment reflected and informed political debates in the United States during the 1800s. Inspired by the diary of workaday actor Harry Watkins, her forthcoming book "An Actor’s Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U of M Press, 2025) offers an alternative history of the nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the book, Hughes explores how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in the United States, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves.
Research Area Keyword(s)
theater, nineteenth century, United States, white mediocrity, reform movements