Jill Dolan

Professor of English and Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts

Jill Dolan is a Professor in Princeton’s Department of English and its Program in Theater, and is also the director of its Program in the Study of Women and Gender.  She began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008. She was inducted into UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in Fall 2006, after winning a College of Fine Arts teaching award earlier in her UT career. During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from 1988-1994, Prof. Dolan won the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Prof. Dolan’s most recent book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, is available from University of Michigan Press (2005). She is the author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Wesleyan University Press); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (Michigan); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Michigan), which has been translated into Korean.

Dolan’s blog, “The Feminist Spectator,” can be accessed at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com.  She has written numerous articles and essays on feminist and lesbian theatre and performance, on performance studies, and on arts advocacy, democracy, and social change. Among her most recent pieces include “Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein,” Theatre Journal 60.3 (October 2008):  433-457; “Seeing Deb Margolin: Ontological Vandalism and Radical Amazement,” introduction to Deb Margolin’s Index to Idioms and “A Slave to Synaesthesia,” an interview with Margolin in TDR: The Drama Review 52:3 (Winter 2008, T199): 98 – 117; “Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto,” in Staging International Feminisms, eds. Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (Palgrave, 2007), 212-221; and “Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12:3 (2006): 491-506.

Dolan has also edited Menopausal Gentleman: Three Solo Performances by Peggy Shaw, for the University of Michigan Press’s Triangulations:  Drama/Theatre/Performance series (forthcoming 2010).  The book collects Shaw’s performances You’re Just Like My Father; Menopausal Gentleman; To My Chagrin; and Must, along with other writing by Shaw, and an introduction by Dolan.  She has also written Theatre & Sexuality for Palgrave Macmillan’s “Theatre &” series (forthcoming 2010).

Her current book projects include a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein; a critical history of US lesbian feminist culture in the 1970s and 1980s; and a history of LGBTQ theatre in the US since 1960.

Dolan is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a past president of the Women and Theatre Program, also of ATHE. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she taught in the PhD Program in Theatre from 1994-1999.