March 04, 2025

By Francis Rogai ’27

Theatre scholar Jill Dolan will deliver Susquehanna University’s Dr. Bruce L. Nary Theatre Lecture, Performance as Possibility: Finding Joy and Hope at the Theatre, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 8, in Degenstein Center Theater in the Charles B. Degenstein Campus Center.

The event is free and open to the public.

Dolan’s lecture will explore joy and performance, as well as the power of live theatre to evoke emotional responses in audiences — responses that may have broader political or cultural impacts. The lecture will also expand on Dolan’s argument that theatre serves as a crucial space for live encounters, especially at a time when screens and remote interactions dominate social discourse. She will also highlight theatre’s reliance on co-presence, sustained attention and emotional engagement, positioning it as a space to rehearse citizenship.

Dolan is an expert on contemporary American feminist and queer theatre and performance. She is the Annan Professor of English and Professor of Theatre at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, where she is the former dean of the college. Dolan has received several awards for her teaching, and for her criticism and research in theatre and performance studies, women’s and feminist studies, LGBTQ+ studies and American studies. Her eight books include Theatre and Sexuality, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and a critical study of the plays of Wendy Wasserstein.

Established in 2005, the Dr. Bruce L. Nary Theatre Guest Artist Fund aims to invite renowned professionals from the theatre industry to campus. The fund honors the late Bruce L. Nary, who devoted his 31-year career as a theatre professor to recognition of the arts at Susquehanna University. Previous Nary guest artists include Kathleen Turner and the late Louis Gossett Jr., Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim.