Hello!

I am a researcher, writer, educator, and dramaturg.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, I specialize in American theatre and ethnic performance, with interests in migration and transnational studies, critical race theory, and comedy studies.

My current book project, Hyphen-Nation: Racial Impersonation and the Performance of Hyphenated Americanness (University of Iowa Press), brings these interests together to explore how U.S. American immigrant entertainers have performed racial impersonations to articulate new meanings of hyphenated identity and the Nation.

My academic writing and research have been honored with awards from the American Theatre & Drama Society, the Theatre & Performance Research Association, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. My work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Researching Popular Entertainment (Routledge), and is forthcoming in Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury). My first book, Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev, has been co-edited with Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig and published by Indiana University Press.

My CV is available here.

You can contact me at maria.desimone86@gmail.com.