Megan E. Geigner
Associate Professor of Instruction, The Cook Family Writing Program
- megan.geigner@northwestern.edu
- 847-491-4969
- 555 Clark St., 202
Megan E. Geigner is a Chicago theatre historian, performance scholar, and writing specialist who teaches Weinberg first-year seminars, Writing and Speaking in Business, Design Thinking and Communication (DTC), and advanced composition courses. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Drama, and her scholarship and teaching focus on the way people perform their identity and citizenship in writing, in speech, in everyday life, and in more codified performance situations. She is especially interested in ideas of nationalism, immigration, and ethnicity, and how communication practices create a sense of belonging.
She is the co-editor of Makeshift Chicago Stages (Northwestern UP) and Theatre after Empire (Routledge). She is the co-author of Theatre: The Lively Art and Theatre Experience (McGraw Hill) and Living Theatre (Norton).
Her research explores the contributions of immigrants and migrants to the cultural landscape in Chicago. She has chapters in many anthologies, including Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage (U of Iowa); Chicago: A Literary History (Cambridge); and Hamilton, History and Hip-Hop: Essays on an American musical (McFarland). She has two forthcoming essays in August Wilson: In Context (Cambridge) and Dancing on the Third Coast (U of Ill). Her monograph (forthcoming) explores Irish, Polish, and Italian performances of cultural identity at and between the city’s two world’s fairs—the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Century of Progress in 1933. Her work has been published in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Review, and Theatre History Studies, among others. She is also the author of “The 1919 Race Riots” Digital Classroom Collection for the Newberry Library.
When she is not writing, she coaches students and professionals on their interview performance and public speaking, works with the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP), advises Northwestern StuCo theatre companies, and serves in leadership for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
She is an active theatremaker. Prior to coming to Northwestern, Geigner directed the United States Naval Academy Masqueraders, and she has worked as a professional dramaturg for TimeLine Theatre (where she is an artistic associate), Court Theatre, University of Chicago’s TAPS program, and Remy Bumppo.