MEREDITH CONTI

Meredith Conti is a theatre historian and performance studies scholar focused primarily on British and U.S. American popular theatre and culture during the Victorian period. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in theatre history, dramaturgy, performance research, critical theory, performance studies, and dramatic literature, as well as the university's Introduction to Theatre for majors and non-majors. Conti’s first book, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine, was published by Routledge in August 2018. She is also working toward a new monograph, Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and the U.S. American Theatre. For her research for Gunpowder Plots, Conti has received fellowships from the Harry Ransom Center, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the University at Buffalo's Humanities Institute. With Kevin Wetmore, Jr., Conti is editing a volume of essays entitled Theatre and the Macabre, forthcoming from University of Wales Press.

Conti’s scholarship has appeared in Theatre Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and the edited collection Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2015). Her book reviews have appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies, Comparative Drama, and the New England Theatre Journal, and she has presented at national and international conferences on theatre and performance, literature and medicine, American studies, and Victorian studies, including those convened by the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), the American Studies Association (ASA), the Northeastern Victorian Studies Association, and the Centre for Victorian Studies (University of Exeter). 
 

Conti serves as Book Review Editor for Theatre Annual and the Co-Chair for MATC's Pitching Your Book and Articles-in-Progress workshops. She received her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she was named an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow and completed her dissertation on performances of illness on the nineteenth-century popular stages of the United States and Britain. Conti holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre performance from Denison University and a certificate from the British and American Drama Academy, an acting conservatory in London, England. Her work in the theatre includes acting, directing, dramaturgy, and stage combat choreography.