Megan Lewis

Megan Lewis is a South African-American theatre historian and performance scholar.

Biography

She has a BA from Kenyon College, an MA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Minnesota.

Career

Her interests are African theatre and film, the politics of performance, non-Western performance traditions, the staging of national identity, gender, and race in a variety of performance media (e.g. the performance of gender (masculinity) and race (whiteness) in South Africa.)

Lewis taught theatre, media, and film courses at the University of Minnesota (2006-2011) before joining the faculty at UMass Amherst in 2011 - where she is currently the Graduate Program Director for the Department of Theater at UMass.

She balances her scholarly life with a professional career as a documentary filmmaker and editor, and voiceover talent.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Lewis has published extensively on South African performance in Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Text & Performance, Theatre Topics, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Her books on South African theatre and performance include Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space - co-editor, with Anton Krueger (Intellect Ltd., 2016) and Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life ( University of Iowa Press, 2016).

Every summer, she leads students on an intensive study abroad program, called Arts & Culture in South Africa, focused around the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.