Yizhou Huang

Yizhou Huang (she/her) specializes in theatre history and historiography, Chinese theatre, Asian American theatre, and global Asian performance. Her current book project, “Cosmopolitan Performance and Its Ecologies in Interwar Shanghai,” examines Shanghai’s vibrant theatre scene engendered by foreign settlers and the influences of these performances on native art forms in the 1920s and ’30s. In addition to historical research, she follows contemporary Chinese performances closely and has published about them in both English and Chinese. Before coming to Barnard, she taught at Tufts University, Florida State University, and Saint Louis University. As a scholar committed to global politics as well as local action, Yizhou has worked on several public humanities projects. She collaborated with scholars of community health and civic life on a research project (2017-2018) about Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, exploring the impact of gentrification on minority communities. With a Mellon sub-grant, she developed “Imagining a Post-Pandemic Global Asian Theatre” (2021-2022) at Florida State University. Addressing the anti-Asian hate that surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, the project featured public-facing talks and workshops by Asian and Asian American artists.

https://barnard.academia.edu/YizhouHuang

Education
Ph.D., Theatre and Performance Studies, Tufts University
B.A., English Literature, Beijing Foreign Studies University

Academic Focus
Theatre History and Historiography
Global Asian Performance
Race and Performance

Selected Publications
“Radical Hope: Locating the Corporeal and the Political in the Transnational Transmission of
Devised Theater,” Theater 54, no. 2 (2024): 31-49.
“Marriage in Death and the Cyberplace of Feminist Intervention in Contemporary China,”
Performance Research 27, no. 1 (2022): 48-54.
“Critical Ambiguity: The Spatial Performance of Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, 2017-
2018,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8, no. 2 (2022): 144-169.
“Performing Lost Politics: Ibsen in One Take (2012) and Wang Chong’ Double-Coded New
Wave Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (2020): 398-425.

Selected Awards & Honors
New Scholars Prize (2020), The Society for Theatre Research, UKBest Paper by an Early-Career Scholar (2019), Chinese Association of Journals in Theatre Studies, China
Emerging Critic Award (2019), Stage and Screen Reviews, China
Helsinki Prize (2014), International Federation for Theatre Research