Robin Bernstein

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who focuses on U.S. performance and theatre, race, gender, sexuality, and childhood during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  A graduate of Yale's doctoral program in American Studies, she is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature.  Her four books include Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Uncle Tom's Cabin to the New Negro Movement (under contract, New York University Press), the edited anthologies Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theatre (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Generation Q (Alyson Press, 1996), as well as a children's book titled Terrible, Terrible! (Kar-Ben, 1998).  She has published articles on Lorraine Hansberry, Anna Deavere Smith, Harlem Renaissance playwright Angelina Weld Grimké, and children's author Louise Fitzhugh. Her invited essay, “Staging Lesbian and Gay New York,” is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City, ed. Bryan Waterman and Cyrus R. K. Patell.  Her most recent article, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race” (Social Text 101 [December 2009]), develops a new methodology by which to analyze material items so as to uncover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances.

Contact information: Committee on Degrees in Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality; Robin Bernstein