Michael Stablein, Jr.

Instructor in the Committee on TAPS in the Division of the Arts & Humanities and in the College

PhD, University of Chicago, 2026

Teaching at UChicago since 2026

Education: BFA, Florida State University, 2008; MFA, Columbia University, 2016

Research Interests: Performance Studies; Theories of Gender and Sexuality; Psychoanalysis; 20th & 21st-Century US Literature and Culture; Masculinity and Whiteness

My research and teaching expertise is in cultural and performance studies, alongside queer, feminist, psychoanalytic, and literary theory, with a special focus on the studies of masculinity and whiteness. Broadly, my research is preoccupied with aesthetic structures of discipline and violence in US American culture across the 20th and 21st centuries.

My current book project, “Boys Will Be Men and Other Consequences,” treats the crises of contemporary American masculinity as a genre problem. It traces such masculinity as a social genre that borrows its form from a literary one: coming of age. The crisis-form this genre frequently takes results in performances of tremendous violence. The project takes up both literary and dramatic literature as well as the cultural residues of involuntary celibates, school shooters, and the Proud Boys.

One of ATHE’s 2022 Emerging Scholars in Performance Studies, I have also held fellowships with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative, all at the University of Chicago. I am a founding member of the Movement Theory Lab, funded by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. My writing can be found in ASAP/Journal, GLQ, and TDR/The Drama Review.

In addition to my scholarship, I maintain a performance practice which deploys (and digitally tracks across social media) a choreography of masculinity as an experiment in repetition, normativity, and identity-formation. This work has been exhibited and performed in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, Paris, and Berlin.

Publications

—“An Inconsummate Man: The Violent Dramaturgy of Elliot Rodger.” TDR/The Drama Review 69, no. 2 (June 2025): 101-115.

—“More (Than) Masculinity: K. Allison Hammer’s Masculinity in Transition.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 31, no. 2 (April 2025).

—“Five on MIKE.” With Fabien Maltais-Bayda, Clara Nizard, Tina Post, and Asya Sagnak. ASAP/Journal, September 14.

Courses

TAPS 10300 Text and Performance

This course offers an introduction to a number of significant dramatic works and seminal figures in the theorization of theater and performance. But the course's aspirations go much further: we will be concentrating upon the intersection of interpretation and enactment, asking how these pieces appear on stage and why. This will not be merely descriptive work, but crucially it will be interpretive and physical work. Students will prepare and present applied interpretations-that is, interpretations that enable conceptual insights to take artistic form. Throughout, we will be searching for that elusive combination of philological rigor, theoretical sophistication, and creative inspiration-probing the theoretical stakes of creativity and testing the creative implications of analytic insights.

John Muse, Michael Stablein, Jr., Andrew Schlager

2026-2027 Autumn

TAPS 10300 Text and Performance

Asya Sagnak — English, Susanna Sun — East Asian Studies, Judith Zeitlin, Michael Stablein, Jr.

2026-2027 Winter

TAPS 10400 Gender and Performance

This spring-term TAPS Arts Core course explores performance practice in dialogue with theoretical frameworks from gender and sexuality studies. How is gender produced and contested through performance? What is at stake in performing a gendered self or character? How can embodiment—including gesture, voice, movement, costume, and repetition—naturalize, exaggerate, or disrupt gender norms? How do gender studies frameworks complicate narrative, character, and dramatic structure? The course mixes seminar and studio practice, including playwriting, acting, dance, improvisation, choreography, solo performance, and/or ensemble creation. Students who have completed the Gender and Sexuality Civilizations sequence or other coursework in Gender and Sexuality Studies will have priority registration for this course; remaining seats will be open to other students. No background in performance required. For more information on the performance practice focus of a particular section, please consult the course notes in the registration system.

Leslie Buxbaum, Michael Stablein, Jr.

2026-2027 Spring