#  Maria De Simone 

Visiting Assistant Professor of English 

 

 

 



   ![Maria De Simone Headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum1611/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/english/files/maria_de_simone_2.jpg?itok=vnL8j_1A) 

 



 

 location\_on She/her/hersBarker Center 14412 Quincy St. 

 email <mariadesimone@fas.harvard.edu> 

 laptop\_windows <https://mariadesimone.org/> 

 

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.