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Jenn Stephenson
Jenn Stephenson
Jenn Stephenson is Associate Dean (Academic) in the Faculty of Arts and Science. Her responsibilities for the Faculty include strategic oversight of admissions and recruitment; curriculum and the academic calendar; enrollment; academic integrity; student services like advising; and appeals.
She is also Professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University, teaching dramatic literature, history and theory, as well as production design. Jenn is a well-regarded teacher and has won the award for Excellence in Teaching in Drama four times. Her 2003 PhD thesis on metatheatre in Shakespeare received the Clifford Leach Dissertation Prize from the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of two books. Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama received the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award in 2013. Her recent book is Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real (University of Toronto Press, 2019). Examining the proliferation of reality-based performance genres like documentary, verbatim, and site- specific theatre in the first decades of the 21 st century, the book argues that although the inclusion of real objects and real words on the stage would seem to increase the epistemological security and truth-value of the presentation, under the social context of post-reality in fact the opposite is the case. Elsewhere, articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, New Theatre Quarterly, and Contemporary Theatre Review. Since 2016, Jenn has served as Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Theatre Review. |
Books
Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2019)
Review by Liz Tomlin
Review by Liz Tomlin
Performing Autobiography in Contemporary Canadian Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award CATR.
Review by Sherrill Grace
Review by Sherrill Grace
Recent Articles
“‘Who Cares?’: The Neoliberal Problem of Performing Care in Immersive and Participatory Play” Contemporary Theatre Review (forthcoming 2022)
“Autobiography in the Audience: Emergent Dramaturgies of Loss in Lost Together and Foreign Radical” Theatre Research in Canada 43.1 (May 2022)
“Autobiography in the Audience: Emergent Dramaturgies of Loss in Lost Together and Foreign Radical” Theatre Research in Canada 43.1 (May 2022)