Bio

Andrew Block is a doctoral candidate in American Studies. His research interests meet at the intersection of Ethnic Studies, Performance Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation concerns how contemporary US-American playwrights think—and invite thinking—the undoing of black historical erasure. Titled Staging Black Impossibility: Performing Unhistoricism, Thinking Negation’s Undoing, this project aims to help academics, artists, and popular audiences to probe theater’s potential to (re)conceptualize black pasts and black identity.

 

Andrew is as passionate about classroom learning as he is research. In addition to History & Literature, he has served as a Teaching Fellow for courses on the performance and performativity of race and gender, contemporary feminist theory, the history and culture of the American Civil War, and creative writing. 

Prior to graduate school, Andrew approached the relationship of politics and aesthetics from a different set of angles, mostly recently in government communications in Upstate New York and before that in community organizing in Seattle and at the US/Mexico border. Having lived around the United States and in Mexico and Chile, he now resides in Brooklyn, NY with his family.