Christian DuComb
Christian DuComb is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University and a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His dissertation, “Racial and Gender Impersonation in Philadelphia from the Meschianza to the Mummers Parade,” will explore the representation of identity and difference in Philadelphia’s print and performance cultures from the Revolutionary War through the mid-twentieth century. Research interests include theories of carnival and the public sphere, blackface minstrelsy, African American theatre history, street performance, and (post)colonial theatre in South Asia and the Americas. His essay “Present-Day Kutiyattam: G. Venu’s Radical and Reactionary Sanskrit Theatre” won the 2006 TDR student essay contest, and his research has been supported by fellowships from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Brown University. Christian performs and directs with the Philadelphia-based theatre company Dead Genius Productions, which he co-founded in 2004 (www.deadgeniusproductions.com). He also currently serves as treasurer of the Performance Studies Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
Christian will be presenting ‘Performances of Fear and Desire in the Meschianza and Slaves in Algiers’ at the MCEAS Biennial Graduate Student Conference: Fear and Desire this September. All panels are free and open to the public. For more information or to register, call MCEAS at 215-898-9251 or email mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
Download Christian DuCumb's Curriculum Vitae in PDF format
