Campus
- Mississauga (UTM)
Biography
Dr. Leticia L. Ridley is an Assistant Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto. Her primary teaching and research areas include African American theatre and performance, Black feminisms, Black performance theory, and the intersections of Black digital studies and performance.
Leticia earned a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation (where she was a Predoctoral Fellow) and the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities program (AADHum). She has presented her scholarship at numerous conferences including the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, American Society for Theatre Research, National Women’s Studies Association, and the American Studies Association.
Leticia has published scholarly essays in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, the August Wilson Journal, Routledge Anthology of Sports Plays, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity. Leticia is also the co-producer and co-host of Daughters of Lorraine, a Black feminist theatre podcast, which is supported by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and a recurring co-host on On Tap: A Theatre & Performance Studies Podcast. She is also a freelance dramaturg.
Leticia’s manuscript-in-progress employs a Black feminist methodology to examine contemporary Black women’s performance culture. Her book, divided into four chapters, archives and analyzes the performance repertoires that contemporary Black women popular artists and entertainers in the United States deploy to assert blackness as a space of freedom, possibility, and abundance: the visual art of Carrie Mae Weems, the Broadway musicals dedicated to the lives of Tina Turner and Donna Summer, the visual and sonic disruptions of athlete Serena Williams, and the technological performance praxis of musician Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. This study argues that contemporary Black women popular artists and entertainers serve as critical voices, preservers, and performers of Black feminist expressive culture, while also rooting their performance practice in an ethos of abundance of blackness.
Selected Works
“‘Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton.” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 34.1 (2021).
“‘Posin’ a Threat’: Countering the Colonial Project from Jay-Z’s “Moonlight” to the House of Representatives.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 42.1 (2021): 141-160.
“Grunt Work: Serena Williams’s Black Sound Acts as Rebellion.” In Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity in Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance, eds. Khalid Yaya Long, Martine Kei Green-Rogers, and DeRon Williams. Bloomsbury Press.
“Surviving Against a Sharp White [Tennis] Background: Black Women’s Absence and Presence in Terrence McNally's Deuce and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.” In Sports and Plays. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, eds. Broderick Chow and Eero Laine. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367810016.
Daughters of Lorraine: A Black Theatre Podcast. HowlRound Theatre Commons, https://howlround.com/series/daughters-lorraine-podcast
On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast. University of Washington, St. Louis, https://ontappod.com
Awards
Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Mellon Foundation African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and University of Maryland, College Park