What a pleasure to curate together this tribute celebrating the remarkable career of writer, scholar, educator, administrator, and visionary leader Jill Dolan, who is transitioning into retirement with a well-deserved research leave from her most recent position as Dean of the College at Princeton University. These essays, all by Jill's former students, grew out of a panel presentation at the 2024 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference. The theme, "Revisioning the Story," inspired us to stage a dialogue about Jill's legacy that extends far beyond her staggeringly impressive CV to consider the impact her ideas and interventions on the world have had through multiple generations of her mentees. Each contributor takes a keyword from Jill's revolutionary lexicon as the catalyst for their brief but powerful reflections.
One way of framing this introduction would be to enumerate the highlights of Jill's truly remarkable career: her eight paradigm-shifting books, oft-cited articles, and numerous accolades—among them induction into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the College of Fellows of the American Theatre; a lifetime achievement award from the Women and Theatre Program (WTP); the Oscar Brockett Outstanding Teacher Award from ATHE; and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, only the seventh woman to garner the prize … and, for a feminist theatre blog! We could add to this list Jill's tenure track and endowed positions at major public and private universities (among them the University of Wisconsin, CUNY Graduate Center, UT Austin, and Princeton), along with her administrative prowess and exemplary service to the field (president of WTP and ATHE, executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY, founding director of the Performance as Public Practice program at UT Austin, and founding coeditor of Triangulations, the awarding-winning LGBTQ book series at the University of Michigan Press). But to dwell solely or even centrally on these career milestones and traditional markers of success would be to miss some of Jill's biggest and most important contributions.
Few people have changed the way we watch and understand theatre to the extent Jill has. She has advocated for feminist and queer work, including experimental lesbian performance from the WOW Café, when no one else did, and even when the work was not particularly polished (due in large part to institutional homophobia and misogyny resulting in a lack of infrastructure and funding opportunities). Building on and expanding theories about viewership developed by feminist film scholars (e.g., Laura Mulvey's "male gaze"), Jill reimagined spectatorship, reframing an experience understood as passive into something active, dynamic, and erotically charged. She did the same for criticism, taking a concept that is synonymous with negativity and judgment, transforming it into a praxis rooted in generosity, which is to say in an informed approach that responds—with specificity and positive inquiry—to consider how a production works (or doesn't) and why it speaks (or doesn't) to audiences. Jill reminds us that in a world where there are increasingly fewer critics employed by major news outlets to review shows, we must pay even greater attention to our role as documentarians of performance history.
Jill has made an impact on what we see, how we see it, and what sense we make of it, because she forges and sustains relationships with the artists she admires and champions. In addition to writing about their work, she has staged festivals and conferences, brought artists to campus as (fairly compensated!) guests, and written troves of letters of recommendation for grants, prizes, and jobs. There's no CV line for this kind of labor. All too often the relationship between researchers and artists is extractive. Scholars, operating within the problematic structures of the academy—and caught in a Sisyphean loop of hurdle jumping and ladder climbing—can be dazzled by an artist's seemingly freer life. Academics all too often confuse the precarity in which most creatives eke out an existence with some kind of romanticized notion of authenticity.
Although she's not one to proselytize, Jill understands that academics (at least those of us fortunate enough to secure tenure or full-time employment) have a pulpit and that we are morally obligated to use it for more than publishing research and individual career advancement. Our positions come with privilege and power (however limited and circumscribed). How might we use it inside the classroom, the rehearsal room, and beyond the walls of our gated institutions? Academia is notoriously resistant to change and innovation, but as Jill shows us, there are things that we can do to make our corner of the world more equitable and just.
As the essays assembled here attest, Jill views the professoriate as political work. She understands theatre and performance as vital modes of collaborative knowledge creation and "transformational cultural practices" that can help us think and feel and act our way through moments of crisis. While she prepares her students to navigate the pathways of a successful academic career, she also expects them to become leaders and change agents. This requires not only excellence in research, but a commitment to teaching and service—on multiple fronts.
In the first essay of this series, founding member of Urban Bush Women and Georgetown's Racial Justice Institute Anita Gonzalez writes, "Jill ensured [that her students] were introduced to the discipline not only as an academic endeavor, but also with an understanding of the discipline's potential for activist transformation. This interweaving of theory with socially conscious practice is what makes [her] contributions to the academy so impactful." An Afro Latine scholar-artist-administrative leader, Anita doesn't see herself reflected in the performers Jill centers in her work, but she finds deep resonance with the concept of "utopia" (her keyword), and in particular with feelings of communitas engendered by both the liveness of theater and the physical bonds of mentorship. In this account of how Jill taught her how "to move through university structures with grace," Anita talks about the importance of allyship, of respecting differences, and of never insisting that parties be on the same page politically or aesthetically. She ends her essay by acknowledging the network of contacts and resources that Jill shares with her students and that they in turn offer their mentees.
Clare Croft, in her contribution on "criticism" (her keyword), writes that what impresses her the most about Jill "is her persistent insistence, across all her writing, that theatre can intervene in even the darkest moments. Whether it be the cruelties of the Reagan years or the chaotic brutalities of the post-2016 US, Jill resolutely maintains an openness to what performance, performers, and criticism might contribute to the creation of a more just society." A dance scholar with a background in journalism, now at the University of Michigan, Clare also admires "the almost absurd degree of clarity" of Jill's prose, noting that her sentences are never longer than they need to be, something that other scholars should consider in their own work. In her entry, Clare talks about how important it is to craft language so that others can engage with it and make use of it.
Like Clare, Jessica Del Vecchio first worked with Jill at UT Austin and recently joined her as an administrator at Princeton (she's also a past president of WTP). Jessica has so internalized the Dolan school of clear writing that she peppers her impassioned account with many sentences that are Jill-like in their unfussy clarity. We get Jill's taxonomy of feminism in a couple of sentences, for example, and the gist of the complex theory of "feminist spectatorship" (her keyword) in a similarly short passage that glides by without calling attention to itself but broadens into a deeply personal story. Jessica speaks about the profoundly life-altering experience as an undergrad riot grrrl of encountering Jill's work, which she credits with rewiring how she understood herself and her role in the world.
Another UT alum, Jack Isaac Pryor, currently at Penn State, offers an equally beautifully crafted and personal narrative of an early and life-changing encounter. Jack evokes with pleasure the six years spent in classrooms with Jill. Although their relationship is one of teacher and student, it’s a very embodied bond, one heightened by both their shared identities as brainy Jews living in Texas in the wake of what Jill has termed the "long moment after September 11" and the radical reassessment of social and political priorities that it precipitated. While Jack left the Lone Star State without knowing what "hope" (their keyword) "can mean in a world of terror," they did learn "that hope shares a common root with hoop, that all things circle back, in due time." Like Jill and her students.
While Jack rehearses a conversation with Jill, Sharon L. Green (Davidson College) and Erin Hurley (McGill University), who met in the doctoral program at CUNY, stage a dialogue with one another about "feminist pedagogy" (their keyword) and the "revolutions in consciousness" it can spark. They structure their engagement as a Top 10 List, a format that Jill used in her later work as a way to offer concrete, creative, and proactive ways to reimagine our academic, artistic, and activist labors. Sharon and Erin model Jill's mode of list-making, which is substantive and playful. Just because you're talking about big things doesn't mean you can't have some fun along the way. In fact, gaiety might be really crucial to the whole thing. Center pleasure and teach what you love—additional Dolanisms that the contributors rehearse. Wear a blazer … and comfortable (but stylish) shoes!
Jill values performance for its potential to unleash desires and to disrupt the conventional ways power circulates, as does Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, who sees it as part of a constellation (along with "theory, practice, activism, and performance"—his keywords) that makes "our field more relevant and responsive to the urgencies of the now." As Dean in the College of Fine Arts at UT Austin, Ramón dedicates considerable energy to "one of our most feared but necessary forms of academic labor: professional service and leadership." At this freighted moment in history, when few people are willing to assume any kind of administrative position, let alone a leadership role, Jill's students continue to serve, continue to stand up and stand out as agents of change.
Neither of us were students of Jill's, not officially anyway, but we've certainly benefited from the lessons she offers us all. We might not have the jobs we do, the books we've produced, the grants we've received, or even the right to be out and proud in the academy without Jill's mentorship, support, and glass-proscenium-shattering model for us to follow. What a privilege to call Jill Dolan our friend and to collaborate on this project honoring her legacy.
In the wake of a consequential election that returned MAGA extremists to power, it's worthwhile remembering that Jill launched her career in the wake of the reelection of Ronald Reagan, whose landslide victory signaled a major political realignment and left many progressives feeling adrift and despondent. Her scholarship and leadership provide a road map to imagine and enact change. These moving entries by Jill's protégés, and the extraordinary human who inspired them, offer utopian and yet imminently practical ways to consider and reconsider both the present moment and our dreams for the future. [End Page E-4]