Judith Barlow

Professor

Ph.D., Pennsylvania

American Drama, Women Playwrights, Expository Writing

Humanities 345
442-4081
judibarlow@aol.com

I began my academic career studying the plays of Eugene O'Neill. I was particularly intrigued by his composing process, which was far more deliberate and complex than critics generally assumed. Like many other female scholars of my generation, however, I also wondered why so few women writers were represented in textbooks, literary histories, and classroom syllabi. This was a particularly vexed question for those of us interested in the American dramatic canon, which seemed to comprise an almost all-male line from O'Neill to Miller to Albee. Slowly I began to discover that even when women dramatists were successful, their works were rarely acknowledged by the theater historians who constructed the American dramatic tradition.

For too many of my colleagues, women's contributions to American theater began and ended with the works of Lillian Hellman. In concert with other feminist scholars, I rediscovered the plays of Susan Glaspell, one of the founders of the Provincetown Players; Rachel Crothers, whose Broadway career spanned more than three decades; Georgia Douglas Johnson, a talented poet and playwright; and Sophie Treadwell, author of the Expressionist masterpiece Machinal. When I became frustrated because my students had no easy access to these works, I compiled two anthologies: Plays By American Women, 1900-1930, and Plays By American Women, 1930-1960.

In recent years I have continued my interest in women dramatists, particularly such contemporary writers as Tina Howe, Paula Vogel and Suzan-Lori Parks. At the same time I have extended my work on O'Neill to include feminist approaches to his plays and a study of his female colleagues in the Provincetown Players, the experimental theater group that launched his career. My next anthology will collect a dozen plays written by women members of the Provincetown, some of whom - including Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay - went on to have notable writing careers in genres other than drama. Both my research and my teaching have been informed by feminist theory, particularly the question of whether women writers can employ realistic dramatic paradigms to critique rather than reify American culture and society.

GRADUATE COURSES (selected)

Workshop in Non-Fiction Prose

Modern American Drama

Contemporary American Drama

Writing and Revision

Gender and Writing: A Feminist Approach

The Teaching of Writing and Literature

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES (selected)

Introduction to Feminisms

Reading Drama

Growing Up in America

Expository Writing and Advanced Expository Writing

Current Issues in Feminism

American Drama

American Women Playwrights

Hellman, Hansberry and Fornes

Contemporary Women Playwrights

Modern Drama

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

Plays by American Women, 1930-1960. Anthology published by Applause Books, 1994.

Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O'Neill Plays. University of Georgia Press, 1985. Excerpted in Normand Berlin, ed. Eugene O'Neill: Three Plays. London: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 164-167.

Plays by American Women, 1900-1930. Applause Books, 1985. Revised version of Plays be American Women: The Early Years. Anthology published by Avon Books, 1981. Translated into Japanese, 1988.

ARTICLE

"O'Neill's Female Characters." In Michael Manheim, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 164-177.

 

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