Biography
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.