Shane Vogel

Professor of English and African American Studies; Chair of Theater and Performance Studies

Shane Vogel (he/him) is Professor of English and African American Studies and Chair of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests include performance studies, theater history, African American literature and performance, Black existentialisms, and the Harlem Renaissance. He is the author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (University of Chicago, 2018; winner of the John W. Frick Award from the American Theater and Drama Society); and co-editor, with Soyica Diggs Colbert and Douglas A. Jones, Jr., of Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke University Press, 2020; winner of the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research). He is also co-editor, with Uri McMillan and Sandra Ruiz, of the NYU Press book series Minoritarian Aesthetics.

His work has been supported by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Center at the University of Sydney, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Prior to arriving at Yale he was Ruth N. Halls Professor of English and Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Indiana University.

Selected Publications

- “Waiting for Godot and the Racial Theater of the Absurd,” PMLA vol. 137, no. 1 (2022): 19-35.

- Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

- The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

- Race and Performance after Repetition, ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel (Duke University Press, 2020).

- “Alain Locke and the Value of the Harlem Renaissance” in A History of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. by Rachel Farebrother and Miriam Thaggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 361-377.

- “The Sensuous Harlem Renaissance: Sexuality and Queer Culture,” in A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson (West Sussex, UK: Blackwell-Wiley, 2015), 267-283.

- “Performative Affectivity and the Letitia Ernestine Brown Divorce Case,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 40, no. 2 (2015): 417-440.

- “Jamaica on Broadway: The Popular Caribbean and Mock Transnational Performance,” Theatre Journal vol. 62, no. 1 (2010): 1-22.

- “Lena Horne’s Impersona,” Camera Obscura vol. 23, no. 1 (2008): 10-45.

- “Performing ‘Stormy Weather’: Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, and Katherine Dunham,” South Central Review vol. 25, no. 1 (2008): 93-113.

- “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife,” Criticism vol. 48, no. 3 (2006): 397-425.

updated August 2024