Wendy Arons
Wendy Arons is a professor and area chair of dramaturgy at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, as well as director of the CMU Center for the Arts in Society. Her research interests include performance and ecology, 18th- and 19th-century theatre history, feminist theatre, and performance and ethnography. She is author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Woman's Writing: The Impossible Act (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), and co-editor, with Theresa J. May, of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012). She is also co-translator, with Sara Figal, of a new edition of G. E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, edited by Natalya Baldyga, which received the 2018 ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship (Routledge 2018; also available online). In addition, Arons has published articles in Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, The German Quarterly, Communications from the International Brecht Society, 1650-1850, Text and Presentation, Theatre Journal, and Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, as well as chapters in a number of anthologies, including “Climate Change and the Capitalocene in Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole” in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women (ed. Penny Farfan & Lesley Ferris; “Brecht and U.S. Actor Training” in Bertolt Brecht in Context (ed. Stephen Brockmann); “Ecodramaturgy in/and Contemporary Women’s Plays” (co-authored with Theresa J. May, and published in Contemporary Women’s Playwriting, ed. Penny Farfan & Lesley Ferris); and “Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Challenges from Ecocriticism and Evolutionary Biology for Theatre Historiograpy” in Theatre Historiography: Critical Questions (ed. Henry Bial & Scott Magelssen). She is currently a co-series editor for the forthcoming multi-volume Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury).
Prof. Arons has worked as a professional dramaturg with a number of leading directors, including Anne Bogart and Robert Falls, and has translated a number of plays from German into English, including The Good Person of Sezuan in collaboration with Tony Kushner. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Theatre Annual and Theatre Topics and on the Advisory Board for the CMU Center for the Arts and Society and for Hiawatha Project. She was curator and artistic director of the “Earth Matters on Stage Festival & Symposium” in Pittsburgh PA in 2012. She writes regularly about theater and culture in her blog, “The Pittsburgh Tatler.”