Wendy Arons

Professor of Dramatic Literature
Area Chair, Dramaturgy
Director of the Center for the Arts in Society

Wendy Arons joined the faculty of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007. She teaches courses in dramaturgy and dramatic literature, as well as advising undergraduate dramaturgy students in production work. She currently serves as Area Chair for Dramaturgy and Director of the Center for the Arts in Society.

Dr. Arons’s research interests include performance and ecology, 18th- and 19th-century theatre history, feminist theater, and German theater. 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 the first complete English translation 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 at http://mcpress.media-commons.org/hamburg/). 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, TDR, 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; “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 co-series editor, with Melissa Blanco Borelli and Elizabeth Son, of the forthcoming four-volume History of Women’s Innovations in Theater, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury Methuen). She writes regularly about theater and culture in her blog, “The Pittsburgh Tatler” (http://wendyarons.wordpress.com).