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Honors Program

Monica Stufft, PhD

Assistant Professor, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

Monica Stufft is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies where she teaches courses in Theatre and Performance Studies and is involved in production work, both as a director and dramaturg. Her specializations include popular culture, theatre historiography as well as cultural, gender and performance theory. Her research focus is on late nineteenth and early twentieth century US theatre and performance, as well as the intersection of performance and pedagogy in the classroom. Interests: Vaudeville, burlesque, Broadway revues, music halls and cabarets; feminist theatre; collaborative theatre-making.

Education

Monica Stufft received her B.A. in English and Theatre from Muhlenberg College, and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Scholarly and Creative Work

Scholarly and Creative Work:


Dr. Stufft is currently working on a book manuscript on the living and working conditions of Broadway chorus girls from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The project is an extension of her dissertation, Chorus Girl Collective: Early 20th Century American Performance Communities and Urban Networking, which was awarded the American Society for Theatre Research Dissertation Fellowship and the Harry Ransom Center Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. As part of Dr Stufft’s new project on the intersections of performance and pedagogy, she co-wrote an article with USD graduate Michael Frederick Ahmad entitled “Performances that Matter: Theory and Practice on a Catholic University Campus” for the spring 2011 volume of Ecumenica. She is also developing assessment tools and considering the theoretical and ethical implications of collaboration as a central focus for undergraduate theatre programs.

At USD, she has directed Naomi Iizuka’s ANON(ymous) as well as Charles Mee’s “The Mail Order Bride” and is working on “TBD” a collaborative-devised theatre piece for Spring 2013. She has served as dramaturg on shows such as “Cabaret,” “An Experiment with An Air Pump,” “The Country Wife,” “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Saint Plays,” “Picasso at the Lapin Agile, “ and “First Lady Suite.” In addition to directing and dramaturging projects at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Stufft served as Assistant Director for numerous productions at the Aurora Theatre Company (Berkeley, CA), where she worked as a dramaturg and a member of the Directors Board for the Global Age Project. She has also been involved in projects at The Magic Theatre (San Francisco, CA) and at St. Mary's College (Moraga, CA).

Dr. Stufft is currently the co-chair of the Performance Studies international Performance and Pedagogy working group, where she is working with collaborators on a project on the intersection of performance and pedagogy in the classroom across global contexts. She is also the co-chair for ATHE’s Professional Development’s subcommittee on Assessment. She recently served as the chair of the Collaborative Research Award Committee and the Domestic Exchange Program Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research, sat on the board of Performance Studies international, and was the Membership and Finance Officer of the Susan Glaspell Society. She is a member of ASTR, ATDS, ATHE, IFTR and PSi.

Teaching Interests

In all of her courses, Dr. Stufft focuses on the various relationships between the aesthetic and the everyday, the real and the represented, and between the self and the other. Her courses are designed to facilitate and highlight the active interchange between theory and practice as well as between scholar and artist. At USD, she offers undergraduate courses in Performance Studies, Theatre History, Contemporary Theatre and Theatre and Society as well as a Special Topics course on Collaborative Theatre Making.