My research, writing, and artistic practice trace the planetary stakes of mass displacement through figurations of the child on the move. I am currently working on my first book, provisionally titled The Child at the Border: How Children Perform Displacement, which is under advance contract with Northwestern University Press’s “Performance Works” series.
Bringing performance studies, childhood studies, and critical refugee studies into conversation, The Child at the Border analyzes recent cinematic and theatrical representations of children on the move from the Middle East and South Asia to identify what I call the adoptive gaze. Displaced children, I posit, elicit sympathy from adult audiences insofar as they are constructed as “adoptable,” whether into the nuclear family or the nation-state. Through close readings, interviews, and my own directorial praxis, I explore how cultural producers deploy this gaze to imagine what borders mean or could mean. Child actors, meanwhile—many of whom are refugees themselves—strategically navigate the roles assigned to them.
Before joining the University of Chicago, I was an Assistant Professor of Theater at Lewis & Clark College. I completed my PhD in Theater and Performance Studies—with minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity—at Stanford University, and have studied acting with Barry John in Bombay and at the Stella Adler Studio in New York. My reviews and essays have appeared in Performance Research, Studies in South Asian Film & Media, Women’s Studies, Theatre Journal (also discussed in the On TAP podcast), and Theatre Topics.