Biography
Rebecca Kastleman (Ph.D. Harvard, 2017) is a specialist in the drama, theater, and performance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her research focuses particularly on modernist theater, extending to stages in the US, Europe, and across the Anglophone world. Broadly speaking, her work examines how modern drama theorizes collectivity, both by exploring the intersections of dramatic literature with social thought and by tracking the implications of performance practice for social and political movements. Her first monograph, Profaning Religion on the Modern Stage (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), reveals how twentieth-century British and American dramatists took up the subject of religion to peer into the histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Scholarship related to this book and on adjacent subjects has appeared in venues including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, American Quarterly, and PAJ. She is at work on a second book, tentatively entitled Chorus and Collectivity, which investigates how modern and contemporary playwrights have reconceived of the theatrical chorus as a vehicle for generating and disseminating new social forms. Her anthology Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, 2025), edited with Darcie DeAngelo, Joshua Reno, and Leah Zani, collects essays at the intersection of art, anthropology, and activism that present critical imaginaries of militarism's dissolution.
For further details on her research and teaching, see her website: rebeccakastleman.com.
