Faculty Profile for Dr. Emily Margaret Banta

profile photo for Dr. Emily Margaret Banta
Dr. Emily Margaret Banta
Assistant Professor — English
FH 365
phone: (512) 245-8231
Scholarly/Creative Work
Awards
Service

Biography Section

Biography and Education

 Dr. Banta received her Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University, where she studied nineteenth-century American literature. Her research interests include early American theater and performance history, performance studies, and comedy. She is currently at work on her first book, Sovereign Pleasures: Comic Play in Antebellum America, which assembles an archive of comic entertainment that sheds new light on the fraught democratization of early U.S. public life. Her work has appeared in American Literature and American Nineteenth Century History.

Selected Scholarly/Creative Work

  • Banta, E. M. (2024). Staging Comedy’s Ends: Minstrel Embodiment in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors (under review). Theatre Topics, 34(2), 159–166. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1353/tt.2024.a932208
  • Banta, E. M. (2020). Agonistic Audiences: Comic Play in the Early National Theater. American Literature, 92(3), 429–455. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8616139
  • Banta, E. M. (2021, October). Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater, 1790-1850, by Sara E. Lampert. American Nineteenth Century History. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2021.1973241

Selected Awards

  • Award / Honor Recipient: Honorable Mention, Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize, American Society for Theatre Research. December 2021
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Catherine Moynahan Essay Prize, Department of English, Rutgers University. April 2021
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Summer Study Grant, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University. July 2019 - August 2019
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Off Campus Dissertation Development Award, School of Graduate Studies, Rutgers University. 2018
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Summer Research Grant, Department of English, Rutgers University. 2018

Selected Service Activities

Member
Bobcat Day Communications and Publicity Taskforce Committee
August 2024-Present
Member
College of Liberal Arts Library Committee
June 2024-Present
Member
First Gen Proud Committee
August 2022-Present
Member
Graduate Studies Curriculum Committee
August 2022-Present
Coordinator and Reader
Undergraduate Research Writing Conference, Rutgers University
January 2022-April 2022