Presenters

Leslie Buxbaum is Director of Creative Research and Associate Professor of the Practice in the Arts in UChicago’s Theater and Performance Studies Program. Current projects include being bookwriter and co-lyricist for OUT HERE, which will premier at Court Theatre in Spring 2026. As co-founder and resident director of the Chicago-based physical theater company 500 Clown (2000-2010), her projects include 500 Clown Macbeth, 500 Clown Frankenstein, 500 Clown Christmas, and 500 Clown and the Elephant Deal. 500 Clown shows performed in Chicago at Steppenwolf and Lookingglass Theatre, among others, and toured throughout the US, receiving an Association of Performing Arts Presenters Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant.

Daisy Delogu is the Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature in UChicago’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She has been involved with the university’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality for over two decades and currently serves as the Center's Faculty Director. Her research and teaching interests center gender and sexuality, particularly in medieval and early modern French literature. She has published on the querelle des femmes, female authors’ appropriation of male-authored texts, gender performance in medieval poetry, and the feminization of the body politic.

Martha Feldman is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. She works on vocal practices, genres, and performances, often Italian, from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including those of madrigalists, courtesans, castrati and other early modern singers, and jazz singers. Her Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2007, winner of the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press), rethought the institution of opera seria as a total social phenomenon, adapting classic concepts of ritual, festivity, kingship, sacrifice, and myth from anthropology to materialist approaches from microhistory. She's the co-editor on a project called “Errant Voices: Performances beyond Measure” that explores insurgent and resilient voices across trans, raced, and castrato cases.

Sarah Nooter is Edward Olson Professor in the Department of Classics, Program in Theater and Performance Studies, and Program in Gender Studies and in the College. She writes about Greek drama and modern reception, and also about poetry, the voice, embodiment, and performance. Her first book is When Heroes Sing: Sophocles and the Shifting Soundscape of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and her second is The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She edited a volume called How to Be Queer: An Ancient Guide to Sexuality (Princeton University Press, 2024), and continues to work on an ongoing project on modern African drama and ancient Greek tragedy.