Kelly Howe is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Coordinator of Gender and Women’s Studies. Her writing focuses on activist performance and appears in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Text and Performance Quarterly, Comparative Drama, etc. She co-edited (with Julian Boal and Scot McElvany) Theatre of the Oppressed in Actions: An Audio-Visual Introduction to Boal’s Forum Theatre (Routledge, January 2015). Her other current scholarship examines performances related to reproductive rights in the US post-2010. Kelly was recently elected as a vice president for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and will chair ATHE’s 30th anniversary conference in 2016. She also served two terms as President of Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO), an international organization for scholars, artists, educators, activists, and organizers working for social change. She remains on PTO's board and has organized its international gathering twice; she will do so again upon PTO’s return to Chicago in 2015. Kelly also facilitates workshops examining power and privilege for social change, and she speaks and writes about notions of civility and incivility in activism. Recent directing credits include Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Way to Heaven, The Threepenny Opera, Elephant’s Graveyard, God of the Gaps, and Phoenix Unforgiven. Resident dramaturg at The Other Theatre Company, Kelly recently consulted on the dramaturgy for A Broken Umbrella Theatre Company’s Freewheelers. She holds a B.A. in Theatre and English from Muhlenberg College and an MA/Ph.D. in Perfomance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin.
Selected Scholarship
Boal, Julian, Kelly Howe, Scot McElvany, eds. Theatre of the Oppressed in Actions: An Audio-Visual Introduction to Boal’s Forum Theatre. London: Routledge, January 2015.
Howe, Kelly. “Embodied ‘Think Tanks’: Practicing Citizenship Through Legislative Theatre.” Text and Performance Quarterly 29.3 (2009) 239-257.
Howe, Kelly. “Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence and Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict Volume II: Creating Just and Inclusive Communities." Comparative Drama, Winter 2014.
Howe, Kelly. “Augusto Boal and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics.” Theatre Journal 58.4 (2006) 726-728.
Peck, James, and Kelly Howe. “Learning with Gertrude Stein: Playgrounds of Aggression and Grace.” Theatre Topics 14.2 (2004) 379-396.
Courses Taught
THE 100 Script Analysis
THE 175 Introduction to Theatre Arts
THE 359 Theatre History and Literature I
THE 361 Theatre History and Literature II
THE 470 Devising Theatre: Radical and Community-Based Performance
THE 393 Solo Performance
GWS 390 Queer Theory