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Indiana University Bloomington

Angela PaoAngela Pao

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Director of Undergraduate Studies

Education

Ph.D. – Comparative Literature. UC, Berkeley
M.A. – Theatre and Drama. Smith College
M.A. – French. New York University.

(812) 855-2671

Ballantine Hall 905

acpao at indiana.edu

My primary fields of interest are theatre and performance studies, intercultural theatre and cross-cultural representations, and literatures of ethnic minorities and diasporic cultures.  I recently completed the manuscript for a book on non-traditional casting entitled No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theatre, which will be published by the University of Michigan Press.  My next project is a direct extension of this research.  I will be comparing multiracial and culturally specific performance in Great Britain and France with that in the U.S.  I am also interested in examining works of narrative fiction by Asian and black British and French authors to broaden the comparative context.  Underlying this genre-defined dual focus is a metacritical interest in the relations between the racial minority critical paradigms that were developed in the U.S. and the diasporic and transnational models that have, at least until now, dominated analyses of the cultural works of European racial minorities.

Representative Publications:
The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire and 19th-Century French Theatre Book:
No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in American Theatre (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming).
The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire and 19th-Century French Theatre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

Articles:
“False Accents: Embodied Dialects and the Characterization of Ethnicity and Nationality.” Theatre Topics. 2004.
“Changing Face: Recasting National Identity in All-Asian American Dramas.” Theatre Journal. 2001. 
"Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Theories." Theatre Survey. 2000.
"The Critic and the Butterfly: Socio‑cultural contexts and the reception of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly." Amerasia Journal, 1992.
"The Eyes of the Storm: Gender, Genre and Cross‑casting in Miss Saigon." Text and Performance Quarterly. 1992.