Amy Hughes

Amy E. Hughes (she/any) is Professor of Theatre & Drama (SMTD), a Faculty Associate of American Culture (LSA), and a Faculty Affiliate of Comparative Literature (LSA) at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. She also serves as a Faculty Associate Director for U-M ADVANCE. Dr. Hughes is a theatre historian who researches US popular performance during the long nineteenth century. Her interests include disability studies, human-animal studies, material and visual culture, digital humanities, documentary editing, and culturally responsive pedagogy (h/t Dr. Geneva Gay). BroadwayWorld.com included her latest book, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Michigan Press, 2025), in its "25 Theater Books for Your Fall 2025 Reading List," and American Theatre magazine published an excerpt from the book’s introduction. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), won the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society of Theatre Research; and she co-edited, with Naomi J. Stubbs, A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor (University of Michigan Press, 2018). Drs. Hughes and Stubbs’s digital edition of the Harry Watkins Diary received the 2019 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre & Performance Scholarship.