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Dr. Emily Margaret Banta

  • Assistant Professor - English
Portrait of Dr. Emily Margaret Banta

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.
  • 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
  • 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
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  1. Member

    Bobcat Day Communications and Publicity Taskforce Committee

  2. Member

    College of Liberal Arts Library Committee

  3. Member

    First Gen Proud Committee

  4. Member

    Graduate Studies Curriculum Committee

  5. Other

    Undergraduate Research Writing Conference, Rutgers University

  6. Organizer

    The Americanist Seminar, The Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University

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