Caitlin Marshall

Caitlin Marshall (PhD Performance Studies, University of California Berkeley) is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Maryland College Park. An American theater and performance historian, she specializes in popular and para-theatrical genres like melodrama, blackface minstrelsy, sideshow, dramatic readings, and concert performance. Her manuscript in progress, "Power in the Tongue: Black Women's Music Theatre Before 1900" charts a 19th century genealogy of musical theater that reclaims the aesthetic and political innovations of Black women who sang on stage. Her research interests include black performance theory and critical race studies, sound studies, settler colonial theory and indigenous studies, disability studies and crip theory. She has held fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She is a recipient of the 2021 Research Fellowship from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her writing is published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Performance Matters, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth Century Music, and SoundingOut!