About
Jason Fitzgerald is a specialist in theater and performance who also holds a broader interest in the literatures often referred to as "theory" (including Marxism, post-structuralism, literary theory, and critical theory). He has engaged in research in the following areas:
- U.S. cultural development from the postwar period to the present, with a particular interest in the history of the Left (old, new, and newer) and counterculture
- U.S. drama of all periods but especially 20th-21st centuries, focusing on the political and philosophical foundations of theatrical form
- The changing fate of humanist thought, in particular claims about progress and historical agency
- Antifascist discourse and aesthetics
Other teaching interests include camp and queer performance, feminism, disaster studies, ecocriticism, and Black radicalism.
He holds an MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama and a PhD in Theatre from Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. In 2020 he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught in the Department of Theatre Arts.
His current book project, “Theater at the End of Humanism: Reading the Radical Sixties Stage” reconsiders the relationship between politics and performance in the U.S. 1960s by mapping the ways avant-garde theatre artists of that decade transformed their practices by grappling with the limitations of the universalist humanism they inherited from the left-wing counterculture.
His essay "Amiri Baraka's Humanist Theatre: A Reading of A Black Mass," published in the November 2024 issue of boundary 2, explores Baraka's ambivalent, critical relationship to humanist universalism through his work as a theatermaker.
He is also working on an essay about managed democracy and the experience of political crisis in Suzan-Lori Parks's "diary plays," particularly her collection 365 Days/365 Plays.
His essay “Ratifying the Myth of Eden: The Open Theater’s Critique of Humanism” appears in the Winter 2018 edition of Modern Drama, and his essay "Climate Staged: The Place of Theatre in The Great Immensity" was published in ISLE in March 2021. His interview with Bruce Robbins, titled "The Possibility of Progress," was published in boundary 2 in November 2022. Short essays as well as book and performance reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, PAJ, Public Books, Politics/Letters, The Huffington Post, and Theater. He is also a practicing dramaturg and theatre critic, with multiple reviews appearing in The Village Voice, Back Stage, and the New Haven Independent. Jason was also the Book Review Editor for Theatre Journal from 2019-2021.
Jason is affiliated with the Department of Theatre & Drama in UM's School of Music, Theatre, and Dance.
