Dr. Megan Lewis,

Associate Professor,

Theater History & Performance Studies,

UMass Amherst,

Amherst, MA

Dr. Megan Lewis is a South African-American theatre historian and performance scholar whose research explores the staging of national identity, gender, and race in a variety of performance media. She is the author of Performing Whitely in the Postcolony (University of Iowa Press, 2016), which explores the intersections of whiteness, masculinity, and national identity, in South Africa. She also co-edited, with Anton Krueger at Rhodes University, Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space (Intellect Books and UNISA Press, 2016), which won the Hiddingh-Currie National Book Award in 2018.

Prof. Lewis is a multidisciplinary educator with a passion for inspiring intellectual curiosity and advocating for the performing arts as a powerful force for social activation and change. Her teaching passions include African theatre and film, the politics of performance, non-Western performance traditions, and the performance of gender(masculinity) and race (whiteness) in South Africa. In 2015, Dr. Lewis received a Distinguished Teacher Award for her passionate work and politics in the classroom. She was awarded tenure at UMass in 2017.