Marvin McAllister

Assistant Professor
Office: 318 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-8019
McAllisM@mailbox.sc.edu

Education

Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre/Drama,
Northwestern University, 1997

Specialization Areas

• African American Drama
• Afro-Diasporic Drama
• American Drama
• World Drama
• Dramaturgy
• Stage Europeans/Whiteface Minstrelsy

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• ENGL 284: Introduction to Drama
• ENGL 565: African American Drama: Realism and Naturalism

Current Research Project(s)

I am working on my second book, a selective history of "whiting up" in Afro-America from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. This project examines how and why African Americans perform whiteness in popular performance contexts, including: Sunday promenades in colonial and antebellum Charleston, late nineteenth-century musical entertainments on Broadway, Black Arts activist and pacifist dramas from the 1960s, stand-up comedy for interracial audiences, television commercials hawking Mountain Dew, and dangerously satiric sketch comedy shows. I am also considering a third book on the Howard Players, which began in the early twentieth century as the Howard College Dramatic Club devoted to performing classical literature, but transitioned into a major academic and professional promoter of "race drama" in American theater.

Books

“White People Do Not Know How To Behave At Entertainments Designed For Ladies And Gentlemen Of Colour:” William Brown’s African and American Theater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, May 2003.

Academic Articles

• “Shakespeare visits ‘The Mecca:’ Classical Drama and the Howard College Dramatic Club,” in Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance, eds. Heather Nathans, Mimi Godfrey, Coppélia Kahn. Newark: University of Delaware Press, (Forthcoming 2008).
• “Dave Chappelle, Whiteface Minstrelsy and ‘Irresponsible’ Satire,” in Black Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, ed. Dana A. Williams. Cambridge Scholars Press, July 2007.
• “Bob Cole’s Willie Wayside: Whiteface Hobo, Middle-Class Farmer, White Trash Hero." Journal of American Drama and Theatre. 14:1, Winter 2002.

Fellowships

• Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of California-Berkeley, 1999-2000.
• Allen Lee Hughes Literary Management/Dramaturgy Fellowship, Arena Stage (D.C.),1993-1994.
• Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, Ford Foundation, 1992-1996.
• Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship, Yale University, 1990-1992.