Amy E. Hughes

Professor of Theatre & Drama

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Bio

Dr. Amy E. Hughes (she/any), Professor of Theatre & Drama (SMTD) and Faculty Associate of American Culture (LSA), is a theatre historian whose research focuses on theatre and performance in the United States during the nineteenth century. Her interests and expertise include material and visual culture, disability studies, human-animal studies, digital humanities, documentary editing, and culturally responsive pedagogy (h/t Dr. Geneva Gay). A deep commitment to anti-oppressive ideals and practices infuses her scholarship, teaching, leadership, and service. She serves as an Associate Director of U-M’s ADVANCE program and Co-Chair of the Committee on Strategies and Tactics to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE).

Hughes’s first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), explores how theatre producers and reformers harnessed the power of spectacle to promote or resist social change. The book received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). In 2018, University of Michigan Press published A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor, a critical edition of the pre-Civil War diary of US actor-playwright-manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) coedited by Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs. In collaboration with Scott D. Dexter, Chris Powell, and more than twenty undergraduate and graduate students, Hughes and Stubbs also created The Harry Watkins Diary: Digital Edition, an open-source, fully searchable transcription of the entire diary hosted by U-M Library Digital Collections. Hughes, Stubbs, Dexter, and Powell received the 2019 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship. The Harry Watkins Diary Project also incorporates forms of public engagement, including a Twitter feed (@WatkinsDiary) that tweets snippets of the diary every day. Hughes’s next book, An Actor’s Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century US America (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2025), is an “alternative history” of nineteenth-century US theatre culture centered on workaday labor. Hughes is also developing a book-length study about changing views toward dogs during the 1800s, focusing on the transatlantic enthusiasm for “dog dramas” in England, France, and the United States.

As a teacher, Hughes believes in the transformative power of collaboration and bell hooks’s “love ethic” to support students’ intellectual, ethical, personal, and professional growth. Prior to joining the U-M faculty in 2019, she taught for thirteen years at Brooklyn College (CUNY), where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award (2010), a Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities (2011), and BC Managers for the Arts’s Outstanding Service Award (2014).