Joshua Chambers-Letson is the chair of the Department of Performance Studies and professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Conducting research at the intersection of performance theory, queer of color critique, and the study of contemporary performance and art, JCL is completing a book on queer love and loss and the art of grief. Chambers-Letson is also the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2014). After the Party studies contemporary performance and art with profiles of work by Nina Simone, Danh Võ, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko Otake, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Nao Bustamante. Using the analytic frameworks of queer of color critique and performance theory, the book traces the use of performance in art and everyday life to foster conditions for survival and continuance for queers and people of color. A Race So Different married performance theory, Asian Americanist critique, and legal theory together to consider the interplay between law and performance in the racialization of different Asian Americas. Both books were winners of the 2019 and 2014 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and After the Party was recipient of the 2019 Erroll Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. JCL is also the co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o (Duke University Press, 2020), Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok (Bloomsbury, 2021), and series co-editor of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series with Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini. In addition to a host of scholarly publications, Chambers-Letson’s writing appears in publications for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Taiwanese Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, and the Haus der Kulturen der Velt. JCL received a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2009, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities from 2009-2010, was a 2021-2022 Presidential Fellow at Yale University, and the 2022-2023 Thinker-In-Residence with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.
Publications can be accessed here.
Courses taught include:
Performance, Sex, and Censorship (undergraduate)
Critical Race Theory (undergraduate)
Art and Performance in Asian America (undergraduate)
Queer Asian Americas (undergraduate)
Queer Love and Loss (graduate)
Performance, Race, and Media (graduate, co-taught with Miriam Petty)
Object Relations (graduate)
Marxist Aesthetics (graduate)