Kathleen Gough

Biography

An Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Vermont, I am a writer, researcher, educator and performance maker and hold a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California-Berkeley. I have spent the last 20 years writing, researching, creating, and teaching across the disciplines of English, History, and Theatre & Performance Studies in the US, the UK, and Canada.

I have spent the better part of my life thinking about form: what is the best medium, genre, or platform for bringing our ideas into our reality? How do we decide on the form that our ideas need to take? Is it simply instinct? A result of our personal talents, hard work, or inclinations? Or does an idea choose us as the best medium of expression? Ideas come knocking at the door of the one who’s got skin in the game.  

The other reason I am obsessed by form is due to my supervising and mentoring a varied group of artists and scholars trying to find the right means to express their ideas in fields ranging from Theatre, Performance Art, Playwriting, Film, English Literature, Law, Archaeology, Anthropology, History and Cultural Studies. Across a wide range of countries and over a couple of decades, my colleagues, students, and mentees have challenged me to find clear ways to help both them and myself shepherd ideas into the reality-form where they can most fully flourish.

I have always been a relational thinker. I need foils, people to whom I can communicate and with whom I can occasionally argue, whether they are next door, across an ocean, or are long dead. I take on topics of singularity – often times, women who appear solo, exceptional, or extraordinary. In fact, they are often so unique that while people are fascinated by their personalities, these same women are never put in a larger framework. We never see how they produce new knowledge about the world that we inhabit today – knowledge that is far bigger, wider and livelier than even its conduits. I populate singular subjects with other singular subjects from the past and present (and possible futures); I introduce them to each other in order to let them know that they were never alone. All the while, I know that this past, present, or future doesn’t exist until I make it so – until I find the right form to bring it, and them, into another kind of reality.

Education

M.A. in Literature, U of Maryland, College Park, 1998
Ph.D. in Performance Studies, UC-Berkeley, 2005

Books

News