Articles and Essays
For any of the following, email me for a PDF if you do not have access.
“Branson Bets on ‘Faith, Family, and Flag.’ That’s a Risky Tourism Strategy.”Kansas City-Star, Guest opinion article, March 12, 2026.
“The Problem with Trump’s Takeover of the Kennedy Center Isn’t the Possibility of ‘Cats,’” The Conversation, April 4, 2025.
“What Live Theater Can Learn from Branson, Missouri,”The Conversation, Oct. 5, 2023.
“Katherine Dunham and the Building of the African Diaspora.” In The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz. Oxford University Press, 2026.
“’You’ve Got a Great Past Ahead of You”: Performance and American History at Silver Dollar City Theme Park.” In Staging Visitation: Tourist Performances and Theatricalized Places, edited by Weston Twadorowski and Bryan Schmidt. University of Michigan Press, forthcoming August 2026.
“Movement on the Midway: Legacies of Dance at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.” Co-authored with Jessica Ray. In Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories, edited by Lizzie Leopold and Susan Manning. University of Illinois Press. Forthcoming 2026.
“Making Space, Keeping Time: Musical Theatre Dance and Temporality.” In Dance in Musical Theatre: A History of the Body in Movement, edited by Dustyn Martincich and Phoebe Rumsey. Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2023.
“The Real Deal: Impersonation and the American Dream in Branson and Vegas.” Co-authored with Maddie House-Tuck. In The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in America’s City of Second Chances, edited by Jake Johnson. University of Illinois Press, 2023.
“The Branson Hillbilly: Commingling Power and Marginalization on the ‘Heartland’ Stage.” Co-authored with Jay Buchanan. Theatre History Studies 41 (2022).
“Dancers and Choreographers: The Laboring Bodies of Musical Theatre.” In The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre, edited by Ryan Donovan and Laura MacDonald. Routledge, 2022.
“Dance and the African Diaspora.” In Milestones in Dance History, edited by Dana Tai Soon Burgess. Routledge, 2022.
“Dance in Musical Theater: Challenging the Distinction between Art and Entertainment.” In Milestones in Dance in the USA, edited by Elizabeth McPherson. Routledge, 2022.
“Dance That ‘Suggested Nothing But Itself’: Josephine Baker and Abstraction.” ARTS Journal, February 14, 2020, doi:10.3390/arts9010023, 1-12.
“Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along.” Dance Research Journal 51, no. 3 (2019): 84-96.
“Dance in Musical Theatre.” Co-edited with Ryan Donovan. Special Issue of Studies in Musical Theatre 13, no. 1 (2019).
“Dancing Dahomey at the World’s Fair: Revising the Archive of African Dance.” In The Futures of Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning, Janice Ross, and Rebecca Schneider. University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.
“What Makes a Musical? Contact (2000) and Debates About Genre at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.” In The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, edited by Elizabeth Wollman and Jessica Sternfeld. Routledge, 2019.
“Ways of Knowing: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Theatre.” Co-authored with Elizabeth T. Craft. In A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical, edited by Elizabeth Wollman. Bloomsbury, 2017.
