About

Amy E. Hughes is a Professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance and a Faculty Associate of American Culture at LSA. Her research focuses on theatre and performance in the United States during the nineteenth century, with interests including material and visual culture, disability studies, human-animal studies, digital humanities, documentary editing, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Hughes is committed to anti-oppressive ideals, which influence her scholarship, teaching, leadership, and service. She serves as a Faculty Associate Director of U-M's ADVANCE program and Co-Chair of the STRIDE Committee. Hughes has authored several books, including her latest, 'An Actor’s Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States,' published by the University of Michigan Press in September 2025. This work explores how nineteenth-century White theatre-makers embraced and perpetuated American cultural myths such as the “American Dream,” the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how these ideals continue to influence contemporary entertainment practices. Her first book, 'Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America,' examines how theatre producers and reformers used spectacle to promote or resist social change, and received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. In 2018, her edition of Harry Watkins’ diary, 'A Player and a Gentleman,' was published, along with a digital edition of Watkins’ diary created in collaboration with students, which received the 2019 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship. Currently, Hughes is developing a book on changing views toward dogs during the 1800s, focusing on transatlantic enthusiasm for “dog dramas.” Prior to her appointment at U-M in 2019, she taught at Brooklyn College (CUNY) for thirteen years, earning awards for teaching excellence and outstanding service. Hughes holds a PhD in Theatre from The Graduate Center, CUNY, an MFA in Performing Arts Management from Brooklyn College, and a BFA in Acting from New York University.

Research topics

• Art
• Political Science
• Literature
• History
• Communication
• Art history
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit By Robin Bernstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024; pp. xiii + 293, 8 color plates, 36 halftones. $27.50 cloth, $26.99 e-book.

  Theatre Survey · 2025-09-01

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  Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit By Robin Bernstein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024; pp. xiii + 293, 8 color plates, 36 halftones. 26.99 e-book. - Volume 66 Issue 3

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• Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature by Meghan R. Henning (review)

  Journal of early Christian studies · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Art
  • Theology

  Reviewed by: Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature by Meghan R. Henning Amy Hughes Meghan R. Henning Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021 Pp. 288. $65.00. In Hell Hath No Fury, Meghan R. Henning examines a series of early Christian tours of hell that range from the late antique Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul to the medieval Greek Apocalypse of Ezra, the Latin Vision of Ezra, the Greek Apocalypse of Mary, and the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Mary. In these and other examples of early Christian apocalypses, Henning identifies an emergent "theology of bodily and spiritual impairment," in which torment and suffering are mapped onto spiritual and moral integrity or lack thereof (19). Henning shows how tours of hell use this theology to construct a "punitive framework" that isolated non-normative bodies, criminalized those bodies, and assumed their effeminacy and disability to be fitting paradigms of suffering. Henning's compelling analysis demonstrates how tours of hell formed the theological imagination of early Christians about bodies and sin—not just after death but during earthly life. In Chapter One, Henning explains the reliance of early Christian apocalypses upon ancient conceptions of bodily difference and suffering. A re-evaluation of scholarship on ancient theories of gender leads to a key observation: female bodies were "marked by flux, pain, and unruliness that required constant discipline and regulation" and thus assigned to inferiority and suffering in a way that male bodies were not (29). The picture of hell in late antiquity, then, threatened those who lived lives of pain and impairment with even more suffering and those who lived in privileged bodies with the suffering that they had heretofore only witnessed in others. This chapter also features an important section comparing early Christian apocalyptic tours of hell and martyrdom texts. While both operated within a similar framework of imperial violent spectacle, the former used imperial spectacle as representative of God's punishment, and the latter resisted and countered the spectacle unto vindication and victory. In the place of the Roman enemy in martyrdom texts, Henning shows how early Christian apocalypses curated a "judicial nightmare" that brought the grotesque tortures of the Romans into God's space (40). [End Page 387] In Chapter Two, Henning focuses on how early Christian tours of hell managed gender and moral expectations around sin through fear. Christians interpreted their marital and sexual lives within and against shared ancient sociocultural norms. According to Henning, early Christians also raised the stakes. In addition to possible societal or relational consequences of adultery, homoeroticism, and incest, early Christians might dread the thematic eternal torments on display in tours of hell such as the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul, or the Latin Vision of Ezra. Such egregious sins were duly punished, often centering on the offending genitalia or other sexualized body parts. While men and women experienced punishment for sexual sin, women bore the brunt of punishment for parenting failures and for the spiritual, moral, and social failure that was the loss of virginity. Henning's analysis of the various groups who experienced torment leads to the obvious conclusion that women were assigned more readily to torment. In Chapter Three, Henning shifts focus to the relationship of punishment and embodied earthly experiences in tours of hell. A menagerie of bent bodies, penetrated bodies, deformed bodies, and other non-normative bodies on display in hell populated an imaginative space in early Christian eschatology. This space, identified as a version of Foucault's "heterotopia" by Henning, established mythic anti-exemplars from these bodies that maintained the parameters by which lived reality was interpreted. These anti-exemplars in tours of hell give tourists the ability to distance themselves from the deficiencies and associated behaviors related to these non-normalized bodies and to map such imaginative torments onto the living bodies around them. This mapping effectively extends the punitive system of hell into the living world to enforce "behavioral containment" and reveal the "true" nature of a person "by the deformed, womanly body they inhabit for eternity...

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• Embracing the Lackluster: Investigating the Life (and Afterlives) of a Nineteenth-Century Workaday Actor

  Pamiętnik Teatralny · 2022-10-03

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  US actor-manager Harry Watkins (1825–1894) was no one special. He yearned for fame, but merely skirted the edges of it. If Watkins has any “historical significance” at all, it is because he left behind a voluminous diary in which he chronicled his experiences during the years leading up to the US Civil War. When the author discovered the manuscript in 2008, Watkins’s lackluster became the subject of her research, focused on the question: what could this minor actor reveal about nineteenth-century US culture—a culture as obsessed with fame and achievement as today’s culture? The author argues that Watkins is significant precisely because of his ordinariness, his obscurity, his run-of-the-mill-ness. His experiences illuminate how “white mediocrity” (Koritha Mitchell) works and deepens our understanding of the insidious power of the American Dream. Watkins’s lack of visibility during his lifetime and subsequently suggests that mediocrity is a stigmatized state of being, a form of abjection. His cyclical highs and lows bring into focus the cultural forces that still shape the aspirations of today’s theater artists, and the triumphs and failures that define their (our) inexorably ordinary lives.

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• Pets, People, and the Enduring ‘Dogaturgy’ of Nineteenth-Century Dog Dramas

  Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film · 2021-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Dogs began playing new roles as emotional companions in Eurowestern households during the mid-1800s; by the 1880s, dogs were widely considered ‘family members’ in middle-class homes. The nineteenth-century ‘dog drama’, a type of melodrama, helps illuminate how, when, and why this attitudinal change occurred. The transatlantic appeal of dog dramas (such as René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's 1814 melodrama The Dog of Montargis) and performers who specialised in the genre (such as U.S. actor-entrepreneur Edwin Blanchard) suggest that sentimental stories about dogs appealed to working-class people as well. These plays reflected, and perhaps contributed to, changing views about dogs during the nineteenth century. The dog drama and its afterlives (in film, television, and social media) shed light on both the good intentions and troubling contradictions inherent in humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals, especially pets.

  PublisherDOI

• Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American StageTheaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage

  American Literature · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art history
  • History

  Book Review| March 01 2020 Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American StageTheaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920. By George, Holly. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press. 2016. x, 266 pp. Cloth, $29.95; e-book available.Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage. By Chinn, Sarah E.. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2017. xi, 249 pp. Cloth, $82.00; e-book available.Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. By Gallagher-Ross, Jacob. Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press. 2018. ix, 233 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $34.95; e-book, $34.95. Amy E. Hughes Amy E. Hughes Amy E. Hughes, associate professor of theater and drama at the University of Michigan, received the American Society for Theatre Research’s Barnard Hewitt Award for her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (2012). Her latest book, coedited with Naomi J. Stubbs, is A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor (2018). With Scott D. Dexter and Chris Powell, Hughes and Stubbs also created The Harry Watkins Diary: Digital Edition, winner of the 2019 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2020) 92 (1): 156–158. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056630 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Amy E. Hughes; Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American StageTheaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. American Literature 1 March 2020; 92 (1): 156–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056630 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search At first glance, the only common thread weaving through Holly George’s Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920, Sarah E. Chinn’s Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, and Jacob Gallagher-Ross’s Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage is the premise that theater, drama, and performance archive important information about US history and culture. But a closer look reveals that, despite their differing objectives, methodologies, and source materials, all three books demonstrate that we can better understand the experience of everyday life during a particular historical moment when we incorporate theater into the story. These authors approach this task in distinctive ways—through local history (George), close readings of literature (Chinn), and the comparative analysis of works with similar themes (Gallagher-Ross). But together, these monographs suggest that by examining theater and... Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

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• Capturing the Invisible: Affect, Loss, and the Problematics of the Panoramic Image in Josef Sudek’s Sad Landscapes

  Routledge eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  • Psychology

  Utilizing both Alan Trachtenberg's concepts of fragmented historical narratives and Walter Benjamin's concepts of history and profane illumination, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Sudek creates images that are politically subversive in their views of history, loss, and progress within the political climate of postwar Czechoslovakia. It also examines the ways in which the failures of the panorama might be viewed as reparative, offering entry points for intervention in and engagement with the past so the people can more actively inform our present, bearing witness to both loss and renewal. Sudek's choice to comprise the Sad Landscapes series of panoramic images was a deliberate one, as evidenced both by his fascination with the panorama as a child-when he created wide-angled images by pasting prints together-and by the great lengths to which Sudek went in order to make panoramic images. The photographs' subjects-decimated, industrialized landscapes, dead trees, ruined buildings, and cities-visually convey loss, injustice, and senseless death and destruction.

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• Fabriano: city of medieval and renaissance papermaking

  Journal of the American Institute for Conservation · 2018-02-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The cultural legacy borne from the rivers of Fabriano is unmatched in the history of papermaking. Its name is synonymous with those creamy white sheets that have endured through centuries, somehow ...

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• Theater; or, Looking beyond Plays and Places

  J19 · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Theater; or, Looking beyond Plays and Places Amy E. Hughes (bio) Alas: some readers, having read nothing but my title, are already annoyed with me. This is because many US theater practitioners, professors, and aficionados have surprisingly strong opinions about how "theater" should be spelled. The subject comes up perennially and persistently in articles, blog posts, and conference panels.1 It seems the spelling debate gained considerable rigor in 1962, when the New York Times quietly changed its editorial policy to use theater instead of theatre—even going so far as to "correct" the names of theaters that called themselves Theatres.2 But the dispute can be traced back to 1789, when Noah Webster advocated for a pronunciation-based approach to US spelling in his Dissertations on the English Language. Observing that the spelling of French words had been retained even though they were pronounced differently in English, Webster complained, "Ought [the Americans] at once to reform these abuses, and introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE?"3 He answered his own call in the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), offering postcolonial alternatives to the spellings of many British (cum French) words. When Chauncey A. Goodrich revised Webster's Dictionary in 1847, he formalized this orthographic philosophy by proclaiming in the preface that the re in centre, metre, and other "words of this class" should be transposed.4 But in contrast to centre and metre, the debate over theatre's ending is far from over. As director and theater historian Francis Hodge once observed, "There is an emotional context that surrounds this word that has made and will continue to make a shift to the-er spelling difficult."5 Further [End Page 411] complicating the matter is the insistence by some that theatre and theater are not merely variant spellings but actually two different words, with the former referring to the art form (and, concomitantly, the body of work it generates) and the latter referring to a place where plays are performed.6 I rehearse this history not because it is interesting but because it is revealing: the theater inspires fervent passion, intense loyalty, even cliquish elitism in those who love and study it. Proponents of the idea to embrace both spellings—theatre as play, theater as place—illustrate this most clearly. As architecture and activity, edifice and event, refuge and recreation, the theater is deeply beloved. However, we need more definitions when looking at the nineteenth century, when "the theater" was also a performance practice, a form of labor, and a community. By attending to these connotations, the chaotic complexities of nineteenth-century US theater culture can be seen more clearly: the eclectic amusements staged in playhouses, the diverse work and workers involved in theatrical enterprises, and the dynamic camaraderie that sustained theater/s. Such nuances expose enduring biases in historiography—among them, a tendency to privilege literary legibility over quotidian praxis; a continuing emphasis on the rich, white, and famous; and a benign neglect of the communal processes that shaped nineteenth-century US cultural production. The literature most closely associated with theater is the so-called legitimate drama: narrative-based plays that were professionally produced and/or published. Yet records of actual performances, such as promptbooks marked up by actors and stage managers, suggest that scripts served merely as starting points. Promptbooks exhibit a wide range of alterations—scenes rearranged, large swathes of dialogue omitted, or entire characters removed to meet the needs of a company. Managers frequently reduced five-act plays to four, three, two, or even one act, depending on what the evening's bill would accommodate or what the audience would tolerate. Even promptbooks cannot fully capture what happened on stage. Actors added personal flourishes or "points" to impress the audience, and often, they were "imperfect" in their parts due to last-minute casting changes and the limited time they had to memorize lines. Their improvised dialogue is undocumented, except for scattered anecdotes in diaries and autobiographies. Additionally, many scripts have been completely lost, for the simple reason that they were never intended to be kept. Sassy parodies; saccharine patriotic skits; [End Page 412] slapdash dramatizations of...

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• Harry Watkins's Sword: An Object Lesson in Nineteenth-Century US Theatre Culture

  Theatre Survey · 2018-07-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  For US actor, playwright, and theatre manager Harry Watkins (1825–94), the 1852–3 season was a whirlwind of ups and downs, elation and despair, triumph and tragedy. His engagement as an actor in C. R. Thorne's stock company at the New York Theatre ended abruptly in mid-September, leaving him without work at a point when few theatres were hiring. He mourned the loss of a beloved cousin, Jane Mott, who passed away one rainy day in October after a drawn-out illness. He endured many a headache while spearheading a fund-raising effort among his fellow actors to contribute a memorial stone to the Washington Monument. He was elected to the board of the American Dramatic Fund Association, but infighting among the directors left him feeling insulted and underappreciated, ultimately leading him to cease his involvement. By far, his biggest frustration was his inability to obtain reliable employment. He wrote many letters to many managers, to no avail. More than once, he considered giving up the theatre altogether.

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• Research Guides: BASW 320W U.S. Social Welfare Policy: Resources

  2016-01-11

  libguides1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Joshua A. Stockwell

  2 shared

• Dotti Anderson

  1 shared

• L Robert

  1 shared

• Nicholas R. Mancini

  1 shared

• Karen Goldby

  1 shared

• Margaret Gisolo

  1 shared

• Marion Kirk Jones

  1 shared

• Joel Kirby

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Thea…
• 2019 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship
• Excellence in Teaching Award (2010) from Brooklyn College (C…
• Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Outstanding Tea…