• Kyle Gillette is the Acting Dean of Arts and Humanities at Trinity University and 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 experiment with avant-garde manifestos.

    Kyle has written three books: The Invisible City (Routledge, 2020), Railway Travel in Modern Theatre (McFarland, 2014) and a slim volume on Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (Routledge's Fourth Wall Series, 2016). His scholarship, essays and shorter texts have been published in Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination edited by Benjamin Linder (Palgrave, 2022), Imagined Theatres edited by Daniel Sack (Routledge, 2017) and Pirandello’s Visual Philosophy edited by Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2017) as well as in several academic journals, including Performance Research, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, the Pirandello Society of America and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Dr. Gillette has published reviews of books and performances in the Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre Survey and Theatre Journal.

    As a theatre director Kyle has worked on plays ranging from ancient tragedy and comedy (by Aeschylus, Euripides and Plautus) to modern classics (including texts by Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard) and more recent plays (by Paula Vogel, Suzan-Lori Parks, Naomi Iizuka, Will Eno, Bess Wohl, Rachel Joseph and others). He has also co-developed several devised works and site-specific performances.

    Before Trinity, Dr. Gillette taught as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Stanford University’s Introduction to the Humanities program and taught Cultural Research for the American Conservatory Theater's MFA in Acting. He has taught, assistant-directed and helped develop summer programs held at Oxford University and UC Berkeley. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University.

    • 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