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Northwestern School of Communication

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Department Chair; Ethel M. Barber Professor of Performing Arts
70 Arts Circle Drive
Room 5-153
Evanston, IL 60208

Department

Performance Studies
SoC Administration
Joshua Chambers-Letson

Joshua Chambers-Letson (PhD, NYU, 2009) is the Ethel M. Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Department Chair of Performance Studies, and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Chambers-Letson’s research and teaching interests include performance theory, queer of color critique, racial performativity and performance, and the study of contemporary art, theatre, and performance. Writings have contemplated artists that include Yoko Ono, Nina Simone, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Danh Võ, Eiko Otake, Tseng Kwong Chi, Muna Tseng, Keioui Thomas, and Nao Bustamante as well as topics that range from performances of patriotism in the Japanese American concentration camps of World War II, to the life maintaining force of queer of color performance, and the recurrent and durational dynamics of grief, loss, and love. The author of three books – Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss (NYU Press, 2026), After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018), and A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (NYU Press, 2014) – Chambers-Letson is also the co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) and France Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital(Metheun Drama, 2020) as well as a series co-editor of the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press. 

Chambers-Letson’s art writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues that include Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, both My Barbarian and the 2022 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of Art, the reader for the 36th Bienal de Sao Paolo, Adam Pendleton at the Kemper Art Museum, Charles Atlas with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and Teching Hsieh for the Taiwanese Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Scholarly writing has appeared in journals including Social Text, Feminist Media Histories, TDR: The Drama Review, women and performance, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. 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

Courses

  • 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)