Daniel Sack

Daniel Sack is a professor in the Commonwealth Honors College and the English Department. He received a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Brandeis University and a PhD from Stanford University’s Drama Department. 

His teaching and research consider modern/contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary arts, performance theory and dramatic theory, and critical writing as a creative practice. He has published five books—including explorations of crying, futurity, the imaginary, and drawing’s relation to performance—and more than forty book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. He is the founding editor of the online open-access journal Imagined Theatres, a site for creative critical thinking about performance, and has served on editorial boards for several other journals. 

His research has been funded with fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Current interests include the intersections of printmaking, drawing, and performance, and collaborative creation with children.

• Modern and Contemporary Theatre
• Performance Art
• Performance Studies
• Theatre Studies and Dramatic Theory
• Creative / Critical Writing

Books

• Co-editor (with Bonnie Marranca), The Theatre of Drawing (New York: PAJ Books, 2026).
• Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series, 2024).
• Editor, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (New York/London: Routledge, 2017).
• Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (New York/London: Routledge, Fourth Wall Series, 2016).
• After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series, 2015).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• ““Portable Theatre: The Paperback Stage.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 46, no. 3 (2024).
• “Footprints: Dance on Paper by Trisha Brown.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43, no. 3 (2021).
• “First Person Plural: The Selected Essays of Nicola Gunn (2010-2019).” Theater 49, no. 3: (2019).
• “Theatrical Performance in the Margins: Imagined Theatres on Page and Stage” in Closet Drama: History, Theory, and Genre, edited by Catherine Burroughs. (New York: Routledge, 2018).
• “Strip-showing and the Suspension of a Naked End” in Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power, edited by Laurie Frederik, Kimberly Marra, and Catherine Schuler. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).

Mondays/Wednesdays 4:00-5:15.