Nick Salvato
Nick Salvato
Nick Salvato (A.B., Princeton University; Ph.D., Yale University) is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Performing and Media Arts, as well as a member of the graduate faculty of English. His work seeks to elaborate, complicate, and extend the purview of ideas about the modern, the minor, and their relationships to one another. In a variety of ways and contexts, he focuses attention on performances, representational practices, discourses, and dispositions that are figured (often dismissively) by critics as minor or that announce themselves deliberately as minor; and at the same time, he considers the ways in which the concept of minority influences or defines the modern, even as minority conceals the centrality of its definitional power and influence.
Salvato has published articles in such journals as Camera Obscura, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, TDR: The Drama Review, and Theatre Journal. His article, "Uncloseting Drama: Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group," won the journal Modern Drama's award for Outstanding Essay of 2007. This piece is adapted from his first book, Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance, published in 2010 by Yale University Press as part of the series Yale Studies in English. Likewise published in 2010 was "Gossip," a special issue that he guest-edited for Modern Drama, where he was book review editor from 2010 to 2014. His second full-length book, Obstruction, is under contract with Duke University Press and investigates the surprising intellective value of five putative impediments: embarrassment, laziness, slowness, cynicism, and digressiveness. A pocket monograph, Knots Landing, was published by Wayne State University Press's TV Milestones series in June 2015.
