Amy Hughes

Dr. Amy E. Hughes is a Professor of Theatre & Drama and Faculty Associate of American Culture at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Her work focuses on the relationship between theater/performance, social change, and everyday life in the United States during the 1800s. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History (ASTR). In 2018, University of Michigan Press published A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor, a digital and critical edition of Watkins's pre-Civil War diary, coedited with Naomi J. Stubbs. Her latest book is An Actor's Tale: Theatre, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States, an "alternative history" of the nineteenth-century US theater centered on workaday labor.