Maria De Simone
By appointment
Education: B.A. and M.A.: Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice (2010)
Ph.D.: Northwestern University (2021)
Interests: Theater History, Popular Entertainment, Law and Performance, US Ethnic Theaters
Maria De Simone is a cultural historian of US theater and popular entertainment. Her research utilizes two deceivingly similar analytics—how individuals perform race as opposed to how race performs identity—to investigate the different ways immigrant subjects construct identities and relations. Her first article, “Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville,” appeared in Theatre Research International in 2019. A second article, “Chinese American Identity, Performance, and Immigration Law: Jue Quon Tai in Theaters and at National Borders,” is forthcoming in Theatre Journal. She is currently completing a monograph on subversive deployments of racial impersonation by immigrant artists in turn-of-the-twentieth-century US entertainment.