Research
Cove of Cork. Currier and Ives. Lithograph. Library of Congress.
As a theatre and cultural historian, I focus on impoverished, disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. My work explores how theatre and performance functions within poor and migrant communities in several ways: as strategies for practical and imaginative community building; cultural institutions that express group identity as well as reinforce dominant social and cultural expectations and prejudices; and methods of social and cultural resistance, adaptation, and survival. I examine these interactions in relation to individual and group identities, including racial, ethnic, gender, class, and religious identity, within local, national, and transnational contexts. In my research, performance is conceived not only as a cultural form that reflects, constitutes, and challenges identity, but also as an active construct that disadvantaged or displaced populations used to serve their own needs. Considering these populations as participants and creators instead of passive observers of theatrical culture and performance is crucial for reconsidering questions pertaining to migration, identity, oppression, and social justice.
These concerns are explored in my peer-reviewed articles in Popular Entertainment Studies, Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal as well as my first monograph. Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) suggests that what I am calling “dramaturgies of mobility” -- repeated narratives, types, images, strategies, and performative practices -- participated in systems of meaning pertaining to mobility and informed systematic oppression as well as served as strategies for survival for migrant, ethnic, and racial groups. Focusing on the Irish in the United States, I argue that nineteenth-century variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and community.
I am currently working on my second book, The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War, which examines the protests and actions by Black activists to desegregate the theatre in the years after emancipation and their immediate and long-term impact on U.S. theatrical culture.
Other in-progress projects include a monograph examining the relationship between transatlantic Irish popular performance and the emergence of modern urban sectarian violence in nineteenth- century Belfast. The project suggests a rethinking of patterns of cultural exchange through transatlantic cultural circulation and offers a model for theatre’s flexibility and response to crises. Granshaw was delighted to share her research for this project in a recent Theatre Survey article (January 2020).