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J. Chris Westgate, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
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Teaching
interests: I'm particularly interested in teaching dramatic literature, broadly defined, though my specialization is in Modern and Contemporary Drama. I've also taught or will be teaching, classes in Restoration, Elizabethan, and Jacobean drama. I have a secondary interest in geography, space, and landscape as they influence literature and have taught American Landscape in Literature and will be proposing courses informed by ecocriticism and cultural geography. I'm also interested in theory courses.
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Research
interests: My research follows two parallel tracks. One focuses on contemporary drama--Jose Rivera, George F. Walker, David Hare, etc.--and looks at questions of performance and space, politics and reception. I'm particularly interested in looking at the interplay of dramaturgy, performance, and urbanism in contemporary works. Additionally, I'm working on projects about modern drama, particularly Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht. In these works, I'm most interested in looking at the formal experimentation of writers attempting to redefine drama in/for modernity and how that relates to a number of questions about identity, gender, politics, and family.
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Brief
biography: I earned my PhD at UC Davis in 2005, with a dissertation on urbanism and contemporary North American drama, specifically, how plays from the 1980s onward have represented and interrogated the built environment and social ordering of New York City and Los Angeles. I have taught at several colleges--from junior college to the UC--before taking this position at CSU Fullerton. I've just finished editing an anthology of essays about Brecht's influence on US theater, which has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and I am currently working revising my dissertation for publication.
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