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About Emily B. Klein, PhD

Dr. Emily B. Klein, PhD is Professor of English and faculty advisory board member in Ethnic Studies and Women's & Gender Studies at Saint Mary's College of California. She is co-editor of Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere(Palgrave Macmillan 2019) with theatre scholars Jill Stevenson and Jennifer-Scott Mobley. The volume explores how theatre and performance use home as the prism through which we reconcile shifts in national, cultural, and personal identity. In her chapter, "Nostalgic Cartography: Performances of Hometown by Pittsburgh’s Squonk Opera and San Francisco’s Magic Bus," Klein investigates how the metaphors of tourism and travel inform place-based performance in two rapidly changing civic tech hubs. 

Her first book, Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance 1930-2012 (Routledge 2014) traces a feminist history of twentieth and twenty-first century American adaptations of Aristophanes' most popular comedy, and has been featured in The New York Times, Ms. and Vice.
Immersive theater and intimate justice in Spike Lee's Lysistrata adaptation, Chi-Raq (2015) are the focus of Klein's current research. Other recent publications include "Failure to Adapt: Affect, Apathy, and Doomed Reenactments in American Theatre's Militarized Dystopias" in Performance in a Militarized Culture edited by Sara Brady and Lindsay Mantoan, (Routledge 2017). Her work has also appeared in Frontiers, Women and Performance, American Quarterly, American Literature, and Theatre Journal.
Her teaching and research areas include twentieth and twenty-first century American political theatre, women's and gender studies, performance theory, media and film studies, and cultural and ethnic studies.

She earned her PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Positions

2021 - Present Professor, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ English
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Present Advisory Board Member, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ Ethnic Studies
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Present Advisory Board Member, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ Women's and Gender Studies
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Present Faculty Member, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ School of Liberal Arts
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2015 - 2021 Associate Professor, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ English
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2014 - 2015 Assistant Professor, Saint Mary's College of California ‐ English
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2010 - 2014 Assistant Professor of English and Modern Drama, Birmingham Southern College
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2004 - 2010 Graduate Instructor of English, Carnegie Mellon University
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Disciplines

Research Interests

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Professional Service and Affiliations

2018 - Present Collegiate Seminar Board, Saint Mary's College of California
2014 - Present Ethnic Studies Advisory Board, Saint Mary's College of California
2014 - Present Women and Gender Studies Advisory Board, Saint Mary's College of California
2016 - 2018 Committee on Teaching, Learning & Scholarship, Saint Mary's College of California
2014 - 2018 Academic Honor Council, Saint Mary's College of California
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Courses

  • SEM 104: Collegiate Seminar- The Global Conversation of the 20th and 21st Centuries
  • ENGL 004: Composition
  • ENGL 023: American Voices: in Indie Film
  • ENGL 102-2: Creative Writing-The Drama
  • ENGL 126: Introduction to Film: American Independent Cinema
  • ENGL 170: Problems in Literary Theory: Intro to Performance Studies
  • ENGL 182: The Drama: Classics to Cutting Edge
  • ENGL 184: Contemporary Political Drama
  • WGS 001: Introduction to Women's & Gender Studies
  • SEM 001: Collegiate Seminar-Critical Strategies & Great Questions
  • SEM 002: Collegiate Seminar-Western Tradition I
  • SEM 103: Collegiate Seminar-Western Tradition II

Education

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2010 PhD, Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University
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1999 BA, English Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
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Links

Contact Information

SMC Email Address: 

Contact Information: 
Dante Hall 315
(925) 631-4763

Email:

Publications (18)

Presentations (36)