Samuel Yates, Ph.D., is a deaf artist and researcher who examines disability aesthetics of disability in performance. Samuel is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre and Resident Dramaturg in the School of Theatre at The Pennsylvania State University. They previously were on faculty at Millikin University, American University, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and The George Washington University (GWU). Samuel received their Ph.D. in English from GWU, where their dissertation research earned the American Society for Theatre Research’s Helen Krich-Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship and the Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship. They completed an M.Phil in Theatre and Performance Studies from Trinity College Dublin as a George J. Mitchell Scholar and a B.A. from Centre College as a John C. Young Scholar. Samuel is currently finishing their first monograph project, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in the American Musical, which concerns disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in Broadway musicals and asks how our notions of disability or the able body inform and transform musical theatre performance. They began their second book project, Strange Speech: Codemeshing Disability and Disorder in Performance, with support from the 2023 ASTR Research Fellowship, and will be a residential research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. in Spring 2025. Samuel holds a Humanity in Action Senior Fellowship for their work on performance and body politics, and they have artistically collaborated with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, The Huntington, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, The Samuel Beckett Centre, and the Gala Hispanic Theatre. Beyond the theatre, Samuel has worked as an arts and accessibility consultant with Gensler Architecture, Great Plains Theatre Commons, and 3Arts Chicago. Their award-winning research appears in venues like The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Topics, Prompt, and Studies in Musical Theatre, as well as edited volumes such as The Matter of Disability (U Michigan), A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury), and Monsters in Performance: Essays on the Aesthetics of Social Disqualification (Routledge). Their textbook Teaching Writing Across Theatre and Performance Studies: A Resource Guide is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Learn more on my CV. (Last uploaded version, September 2024).
Samuel Yates chairing a panel at the “Global Chaucer and Shakespeare in the Digital World” colloquium at the Churchill Center in George Washington University’s Gelman Library. A light-skinned person in a vest and pink shirt delivers comments to a room of scholars. Beside Yates an interpreter dressed in black facilitates access for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants.
Background
My research originates in part from my long interest in disability and the musical. Perhaps this is a byproduct of the earliest musical I can remember seeing live, a production of Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s The Secret Garden at Music Theatre Louisville. The 1991 adaptation of Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is full of remarkably unwell people: the perishing Lennoxes, a hunchbacked Archibald Craven, Colin—bedridden with an undefined but certainly fatal illness, and a heroine afraid to sleep due to traumatic night terrors. The ill condition of these characters are presumably alleviated by the curative powers of the eponymous secret garden, but the story leaves many questions unanswered: Why does no one admonish Dr. Craven, Archibald’s brother, Dr. Craven, for his misdiagnosis and poor care of Colin? Does the English pastoral scene permanently quell Archibald and Mary’s traumatic history? How does Colin, bedridden for ten years, miraculously rise from his wheelchair to walk? The show bid questions that neither a six-year-old nor his tired grandparents were able to answer.
Now, as a theater practitioner and scholar, I have additional questions: Why do we continue the casting practice of employing able-bodied actors in disabled roles, when we have abandoned miscasting by gender, race, and ethnicity? Is the theatrical illusion of disability shattered when spectators know the performer is able-bodied? Or do such performances actually rely on the extension of the able-body into the realm of disabled embodiment onstage? To answer these queries, or if not, arrive at better questions, my work explores the contact points between disabled embodiment and contemporary performing arts.
“I’ve already recommended the course to my friends… Professor Yates seemed to strike a balance between being professional and being approachable. He was engaging, funny, yet still challenged me as a student. Truly a great professor.”
/ student evaluation /
Experience
I came to academia through artistic practice. As a deaf actor, I grew increasingly frustrated by the ways in which disability is represented in artistic works and absent in audition rooms, rehearsal halls, and performance venues. Early in my career, I took a summer literary internship at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center to explore better ways of creating art. On my first day, the then-literary manager told me that the best tool in a dramaturg’s kit is listening. This casual bit of advice changed the arc of my professional life.
As a scholar, teacher, and performance artist, I think of my skillsets as drawing on active listening. Given that I use hearing aids to facilitate listening, it’s fair to say that I’ve given a lot of thought to what it means to cultivate an active listening practice and use what I’ve learned to create, inspire, teach, and empower.
In 2019, I completed my Ph.D. at The George Washington University, where my dissertation, Cripping Broadway: Neoliberal Performances of Disability, won the American Society for Theater Research’s Helen Krich-Chinoy Award and the GWU Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, as well as a travel grant by the American Comparative Literature Association.
I am currently at work on a monograph based on this research. New archival work has been supported by ATDS and ASTR. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre at The Pennsylvania State University School of Theatre.
Ph.D., English
the George washington university, 2019
M.Phil, Theatre & Performance STudies
Trinity College Dublin, 2013
B.A. DRAMATIC ARTS AND ENGLISH
CENTRE COLLEGE, 2011
PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATES