Amy E. Hughes

Dr. Amy E. Hughes is Associate Professor of Theatre & Drama at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her work focuses on the relationship between theater/performance and visual, print, and material culture in the United States during the 1800s. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). In fall 2018, University of Michigan Press published A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor, a digital and critical edition of Watkins's pre-Civil War diary, which she coedited with Dr. Naomi J. Stubbs. Her writing has appeared in J19: The Journal of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Survey (among others) as well as several edited collections. She is currently working on a monograph, An Actor's Tale: Theatre, Culture, and Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century US America, an "alternative history" of the nineteenth-century US theater centered on workaday labor.