teddy lance

hello! i am a PhD candidate in English at the University of Southern California.

i work on Shakespeare performances in the latter 19th-century & early 20th-century United States. My dissertation—titled Shakespeare Performance & White Racial Destiny in the Progressive Era U.S.—is a cultural history of liberal white supremacy as told through Shakespeare performance from 1866 to the mid-20th century. It draws together critiques of liberal humanism from disparate fields such as Early Modern Race Studies, Black Studies, Critical Carceral Studies, & Performance Studies to reveal a Shakespearean humanism that helped redefine Americanness through its synthesis with racial science, settler colonial education, & military & cultural imperialism. In four chapters & an introduction, i show how this period’s Shakespearean logic sought to transcend a “savagery” defined through oppression of racial-colonial otherness.  Shakespeare Performance & White Racial Destiny thus examines US liberal whiteness under colonial racial capitalism as a long-term project partially rooted in reinterpretations of early modern literary history. Other research includes work tracing gender & racial performance within the online contemporary far right presented at the American Comparative Literature Association (2018).