Daniel Sack

Daniel Sack is a professor in the Commonwealth Honors College and the English Department, where he serves as Graduate Program Director for the MA/PhD programs. He received his B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Brandeis University and M.A./Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Drama Department. Professor Sack's research traverses modern/contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary performance more broadly conceived (dance, performance art, and the visual arts), performance theory and dramatic theory, and critical writing as a creative practice. 

His first book, After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (University of Michigan Press 2015), explores how live performance stages different structures for representing the future's many divergent courses. A second short book, Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, was published by Routledge in 2016. His most recent book, Cue Tears: on the Act of Crying (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press in 2024), regards the tear onstage and onscreen as a prism through which to reconsider how we feel alone and with others. At present, he is at work on a project about drawing, printmaking, and performance. 

He is the editor of Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (Routledge 2017), which gathers a host of conceptual performances, fantastical plays, and theoretical closet dramas written by close to 100 scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. The book received the 2018 Excellence in Editing Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Professor Sack is the founding editor of the online open-access journal Imagined Theatres, a site for creative critical thinking about performance. He also serves on the editorial board of Contemporary Theatre Review, and as a contributing editor for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and Yale’s Theater magazine. 

In addition to his book-length work, Professor Sack has published more than forty book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. His research has been funded with fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation.

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

Books

• After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series, 2015).
• Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape (New York/London: Routledge, Fourth Wall Series, 2016).
• Editor, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (New York/London: Routledge, 2017).
• Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series, forthcoming).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• “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).
• “The Malady of Film in the Theatre: Katie Mitchell Directs Marguerite Duras.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 41, 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.