Dr. Amy Kritzer, professor of English and theater, will speak on “Antebellum Plays by American Women: Contexts and Themes” at the final event in the Department of English Colloquium Series. Join Kritzer from 3 to 4 p.m. Friday, April 16, in Room 126, John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts.
She will talk about women playwrights in the early decades of the new American nation who challenged notions of the “woman’s place” by building on an already strongly perceived link between national and domestic life and expanding the concept of the domestic.
However, the industrial revolution, which brought widespread changes to American society in the decades before the Civil War, changed the dominant perceptions of the domestic sphere and created new barriers for women trying to transcend the division between public and private.
This talk will touch upon the work of selected women dramatists from 1795 to 1855, examining changing themes and emphases within their plays.
Kritzer taught in the Theater Department from 1997 to 2008 and has taught in the English Department since 2009. She has a B.S. degree from Temple University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
She is author of the books: Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing 1995-2005, Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Plays by Early American Women, 1775-1850, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995; and The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment, London: The Macmillan Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
For more information about the Colloquium Series call the English Department, (651) 962-5600.
