I am a lecturer in the Department of Music and Theater Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I served as a 2022-24 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the “Scholarship Across Boundaries” program. I joined MIT after being a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University and receiving my Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies from Northwestern University.

I specialize in American theatre and ethnic performance, with interests in immigration and transnational studies, critical race theory, and comedy studies. My current book project brings these interests together to explore the ways in which American immigrant entertainers have used the genre of racial impersonation to articulate new meanings of hyphenated identity.

My academic research has been honored with grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and The Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. My work has appeared in Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International and is forthcoming in Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury) and Researching Popular Entertainment (Routledge). 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 mariades@mit.edu.