• As Associate Provost, Kyle Gillette supports free expression and constructive dialogue. He started The Conversation at Trinity University, a series that promotes discussions across disciplines and differences. He also launched and continues to lead the planning process for the Trinity University Festival of the Arts. Kyle serves as the Academic Affairs liaison to the Dean of Students office and collaborates extensively with colleagues in Student Affairs. He supervises the Directors of Academic Advising and the Center for Experiential Learning and Career Success and offers administrative oversight for the Academic Honor Council.

    Prior to his current role, Kyle served as the Special Adviser to the Provost for Expression and Civil Discourse, the Acting Dean of Arts and Humanities and the Director of Theatre. A Professor in the Department of Human Communication and Theatre, his courses range from theatre history and dramatic literature seminars to performance laboratories where students reimagine ancient tragedy, explore modern realism or create pieces inspired by avant-garde manifestos. As a director, Kyle has staged plays ranging from Ancient Greek tragedies to modern classics and new and devised works.

    As a scholar, Kyle has written three books and more than a dozen articles, chapters and reviews published in journals and collected volumes. His research explores the aesthetics of travel, literature about cities, the influence of transportation technologies on theatrical space and time and philosophies of perception. He earned his Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University, where he also served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Introduction to the Humanities program.

    • Ph.D., Stanford University
    • B.A., Trinity University

    Books

    • The Invisible City: Travel, Attention and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
    • Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, Fourth Wall (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
    • Railway Travel in Modern Theatre: Transforming the Space and Time of the Stage (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014).

     

    Chapters

    • ​“Visible Cities: Calvino in Performance,” Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination ed. Benjamin Linder (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
    • ​“’My Portrait Come to Life’: Visions of Self in Pirandello’s Henry IV” in Pirandello’s Visual Philosophy, ed. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017).
    • "Realism"; "Imagined Cities: after Calvino"; and "Triptych" in Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, ed. Daniel Sack (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).

     
    Articles

    • “Six Characters in Search of a Legacy,” Pirandello Society of America 33 (2020-21).
    • ​“Poor Things: Naturalistic Props and the Death of American Material Culture in Sam Shepard’s Action,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 25.2 (Spring 2013).
    • ​“Zen and the Art of Self-Negation in Samuel Beckett’s Not I,” Comparative Drama 46.3 (Fall 2012).
    • ​“Improvising New Rituals for the Bacchae,” Theatre/Practice 1.1 (Spring 2012).
    • ​"Upholstered Realism and the Great Futurist Railroad: Theatrical ‘Train Wrecks' and the Return of the Repressed," Performance Research 15.2 (Summer 2010).
    • ​“Loco Motion: Railway Perception, Relativity, and the Stage,” Performance Research 12.2 (Summer 2007).
    • ​“’A Hole in the Paper Sky’: Psycho-Scenographic Rifts in Pirandello’s Henry IV,” Modern Drama 48.1 (Spring 2005).

    • Dramatic literature
    • Urban studies
    • Travel
    • Perception
    • Philosophy
    • Performance studies

    • Chair of the Advising and Registration Committee
    • Editorial Board of Trinity University Press
    • Starting Strong QEP Implementation Team
    • Reading TUgether Selection Committee
    • Mellon Steering Committee
    • Association for Theatre in Higher Education
    • American Society for Theatre Research
    • Performance Studies international