Jason Fitzgerald

Jason Fitzgerald 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. He 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.

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. Meanwhile, he has begun a new research trajectory in ecocriticism, beginning with the study of theatrical representations of global warming and expanding into a larger project that will compare cultural responses to nuclear warfare from the 1960s-70s with similar responses to climate catastrophe in the 21^st century. These projects are linked by an interest in the changing fate of humanist thought, in particular claims about progress and historical agency, in US culture since the second world war.

Jason was the Book Review Editor for Theatre Journal from 2019-2021 and is currently an assistant editor for boundary 2, where his interview with Bruce Robbins, titled "The Possibility of Progress," was published in November 2022. 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. 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.