Rachel Joseph, Ph.D.

Rachel Joseph is an Associate Professor at Trinity University as well as a writer, director, and performer. She teaches classes in playwriting, dramatic literature, performance, and theatre history. She received her MA in theatre studies and MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University. Her current book project, Screened Stages: On Theatre in Film analyzes cinema and performance in relationship to presentness and reproducibility. Her scholarly work has been published or are forthcoming in academic journals such as Performance Research, College Literature, Word & Image, The International Journal of Žižek Studies, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and Studies in Musical Theatre and chapters in books including The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies edited by Douglas Rosenberg (Oxford University Press, 2016)., Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs edited by David Forrest, Graeme Harper, and Jonathan Rayner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Approaching Twin Peaks: Critical Essays on the Original Series edited by Dominick Grace and Eric Hoffman (McFarland, 2017), Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts edited by Laurence Howe, James E. Caron, and Benjamin Click (Scarecrow Press, 2013), and The Films of Wes Anderson: Critical Essays on an Indiewood Icon, edited by Peter Kunze (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Joseph’s short stories and plays have been published or are forthcoming in literary journals such as Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, The Coachella Review, The Brooklyn Review, and the book Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage edited by Daniel Sack (Routledge, 2017). Her novella was a shortlisted finalist for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom competition. Additionally, Joseph was a finalist for the 2017 Arts & Letters Drama Prize, a semi-finalist for the 2017 Elixir Press Fiction Award, and a finalist for the 2017 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize.

Joseph’s produced plays include The Screen Dreams of Buster Keaton (reviewed in Theatre Journal), And This Before Leaving, Stripped, The Message, and Blurred. She has directed and devised plays ranging from her own to Sarah Ruhl’s translation/adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, the Trinity student devised Between Worlds, and Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights. She co-directed Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart with her colleague Stacey Connelly, Ph.D. at the McNay Art Museum. This spring she will be directing Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns: a post-electric play for the Trinity Theatre mainstage.