Communication, Media, and Performance

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love Queer Theory”

This presentation will focus on how my personal experiences as a member of the LGBTQ community, have affected my teaching and research, and vice versa.  I will discuss both how I came to identify as queer and how queer and feminist theory gave me a way to understand my personal experience of “coming out.” Queer and feminist theory framed my struggle to make sense of my sexual identity, while also linking that struggle to the larger LGBT community.  At the same time, my personal struggles have deeply informed my scholarly interests, especially my teaching, research, and public advocacy for LGBTQ folks.

Lunch to follow in the Vuke Production Wing.

The Playshop Theatre is happy to announce a new online ticketing service for Allegheny students:https://sites.allegheny.edu/playshop/allegheny-student-reservation/ Performance dates for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” are November 15 – 18. Allegheny students may reserve one free ticket per production. Student tickets will be available for pick-up one hour before the show.

MEADVILLE, Pa. – March 15, 2010 – Allegheny College student Kaitlin Mackenzie has won the first place award in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, a national competition for undergraduate theatre scholars.

Mackenzie, a theatre and English double major and history minor, submitted a paper titled “The Innovation of Adaptation: The History and Artistic Contributions of Shared Experience Theatre Company.” Her paper was one of 47 entries from students at colleges and universities across the United States.

Mackenzie’s paper discusses Shared Experience, a British group that specializes in adapting literary works for theatrical performance. She initially wrote it for a junior seminar taught at Allegheny last fall by Beth Watkins, professor of theatre and communication arts.

“I’m delighted that Kaitlin won this award, though not surprised, because she’s a lucid writer and an excellent scholar,” Watkins said. “Her exploration of Shared Experience’s techniques was a mature, insightful account of performance as a collaborative art – how actors work together with writers and directors to translate narrative into physical movement, and thereby to devise an original work of art.”

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival is a national theatre program involving 18,000 students from more than 600 colleges and universities nationwide. Through the program, theatre departments and student artists showcase their work and receive outside assessment from respected scholars at state, regional and national festivals.

Allegheny College is a national liberal arts college where 2,100 students with unusual combinations of interests and talents develop highly valued abilities to explore critical issues from multiple perspectives.