Lecturer, Performance as Public Practice Cline Curator of Theater & Performing Arts, Harry Ransom Center
Dr. Eric Colleary is the Cline Curator of Theatre & Performing Arts at the Harry Ransom Center, an international humanities research library, archive and museum where he is responsible for the interpretation, management and growth of the center’s extensive performing arts holdings. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Historiography from the University of Minnesota. His research has focused on the relationship between performance, history and sexual identity and the ways that archives construct and perform identities over time. He has organized several major exhibitions and is a frequent speaker on subjects relating to performance history, research methods and caring for performance archives. He is working on a book about British interwar theatre and is actively collecting material documenting the impact of the events of 2020 on the theatre profession. He serves on the boards for the American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP) and the Theatre Library Association (TLA). Previously, he was a visiting professor in Theatre and Dance at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he taught classes in theatre history, performance theory, sexuality studies and public history/museum studies.
What do you enjoy most about being a part of the UT Theatre and Dance community?
The incredible students in the program - such enthusiasm, passion and talent for what they do.
American and British Theatre History, Archival Research Methods, Dance History, Digital Humanities, GLBT and Sexuality Studies, Museum Studies, Musical Theatre History, Performance Studies, Public History, Queer Theory, Theatre Historiography
Recent Publications
- "The Collected Plays of A. A. Milne" (In Progress)
- “Archives” in Tom Stoppard in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
- “Behind the Bookcase: Houdini as Collector” in Early Popular Visual Culture (2019)
- “Grappling with the Past: On Exhibiting Minstrelsy Materials” for the Harry Ransom Center Magazine (2018)
- "Anne Frank and the Archive” for the Harry Ransom Center Magazine (2015)
- "At the Foot of the Mountain" Pastelgram 5 (Fall, 2015)
- "A Queer Victorian Marriage: Henry Blake Fuller's At Saint Judas's and the 'Tyranny' of the Archival Document" Performing Arts Resources 28 (Summer, 2011)
Recent Talks and Presentations
- “Williams at Work: The Glass Menagerie at 75” at the Harry Ransom Center (March, 2020)
- Plenary Panelist “The Practice of Public-Facing Scholarship” at the American Society for Theatre Research conference (November, 2019)
- “Bardolatry on the Boards: Shakespeare in Early America” for the Hidden Room Theatre at the Neil Cochran House (August 2019)
- “Holding Williams” at the New Orleans Tennessee Williams Festival (March 2019)
- “Preserving Performance in Special Collections” at the Tsubouchi Museum in Tokyo, Japan (February 2018)
- “Staging Uncle Tom: Tableaus on Print, Stage, and Screen” at Columbia University (December 2017)
Recent Exhibitions
- Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at 75 (2020)
- The Golden Age of Magic Posters (2019)
- Inside the Arthur Miller Papers (2019)
- Terrence McNally at 80 (2018)
- Vaudeville! (2018)
- Shakespeare in Print & Performance (2016)
Contact Information
Email address
ecolleary@
Website
stagestories.org
Phone
512-475-6502
Campus location
HRC