About
Jason Fitzgerald studies U.S. cultural development from the postwar period to the present, with a particular interest in the political and philosophical foundations of theatrical form, and in the changing fate of humanist thought, in particular claims about progress and historical agency. 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, “Theatre at the End of Humanism,” 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. He also has research and teaching interests in ecocriticism, antifascism, disaster studies, camp and queer performance, feminism, and African-American drama.
His latest essay, published in the November 2024 issue of boundary 2, is titled "Amiri Baraka's Humanist Theatre: A Reading of A Black Mass" and 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.
