Katherine A. Zien

Teaching and Supervision

I regularly teach courses on a range of topics, including the following:

  • Critical and comparative studies of race in the Americas
  • Race and performance in the Western Hemisphere
  • Black theatre, drama, and performance (ENGL 430)
  • Latin American and Caribbean theatre (ENGL 431)
  • Theatre in the USA and Canada
  • Introduction to Theatre Studies (ENGL 230)
    • A required course for McGill University’s theatre and drama major
    • An 85-person undergraduate survey course on world theatre history and play analysis.
  • Poetics of Performance (ENGL 355)
    • A required course for McGill University’s theatre and drama major
    • An undergraduate seminar investigating theories, practices, and poetics of theatre and performance.
  • Gender, sexuality, feminism, and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean (ENGL 454)
  • Latin America’s cultural Cold War (LACS 497)
  • Popular entertainments, from the nineteenth century to the present (ENGL 371)
  • Theories, practices, politics, and aesthetics of improvisation (ENGL 662)
    • A graduate seminar delving into interdisciplinary theories and practices of improvisation across Black thought, musicology, dementia care, theatre, dance, and performance studies, and disability studies
  • Theatre and multiculturalism in Canada (ENGL 376)
  • Critical approaches to musical theatre
  • Performance as/and History (ENGL 566)
    • A graduate seminar providing a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which theories and methods of theatre and performance studies intersect with, and at times challenge, historiographic approaches.

Supervision

I enjoy supervising a range of projects. I seek to enrich supervision through the creation of lateral networks and relationships, to develop a strong cohort for enhanced morale and better research. Topics of past and present postdoctoral, PhD, and Master’s projects under my supervision include:

  • Verbatim and documentary theatre in the USA and Canada
  • The theatre of Tarell Alvin McCraney
  • US performance and experimental poetry in the 1970s
  • Performance art, the female-identifying body, and ‘thing theory’
  • Staging history in theatrical productions about the French and Haitian Revolutions
  • Performance and activism in South Asian oral poetry traditions
  • Performance, history, and coexistence in Kahnawà:ke/Montreal
  • Gender and sexual politics in African literature
  • Representations of the Korean war in cross-border cultural production