Michelle Granshaw

Michelle Granshaw’s research focuses on impoverished, disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. As a theatre and cultural historian, her work explores how theatre and performance function in several ways: as strategies for practical and imaginative community building; cultural institutions that express group identity as well as reinforce dominant social and cultural expectations and prejudices; and methods of social and cultural resistance, adaptation, and survival. Her research interests include U.S. and Irish theatre, popular entertainment, and performance; performances of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; global and diasporic performance; mobility and performance; historiography; and dramaturgy.

Her book Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) argues that nineteenth-century American variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and ethnic community in the United States. She analyzes how what she calls “dramaturgies of mobility” -- repeated narratives, types, images, strategies, and performative practices -- participated in systems of meaning pertaining to mobility and informed systematic oppression as well as served as strategies for survival. Irish on the Move was named a finalist for the 2019 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Book Award.

Her second book project, The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War, presents a new history of desegregation, protest, and the theatre. In its exploration of the two decades after the Civil War, this book reimagines theatre’s role in the fight for civil rights as well as the way Reconstruction, civil rights activism, and the white backlash to these efforts shaped U.S. theatre as an institution, a cultural site, and political space.

Other in-progress research includes a project examining the relationship between transatlantic Irish popular performance and the emergence of modern urban sectarian violence in nineteenth- century Belfast. Granshaw was delighted to share her research for this project in Theatre Survey (January 2020).

Granshaw recently published a book chapter on theatre and mobility in American Literature in Transition: The Long Nineteenth Century, Volume II: 1820-1860 and her articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal. Her reference articles have appeared in The Atlas of Boston History: The Making of a City and BlackPast.org. She has presented her research at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and Mid-America Theatre Conference among others.

Granshaw’s work has been recognized and supported through awards, grants, and fellowships. Her in-progress second book, The Fight for Desegregation, has been supported by a 2026-7 ACLS Fellowship, Franklin Research Grant, ASTR Research Fellowship, and 2024 University of Pittsburgh Momentum Microgrant. Irish on the Move received support through the Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, American Theatre and Drama Society Faculty Travel Award, and a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship. In 2014, Granshaw was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for her Theatre Survey (January 2014) article “The Mysterious Victory of the Newsboys: The Grand Duke Theatre’s 1874 Challenge to the Theatre Licensing Law.” "Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage,” part of Irish on the Move’s first chapter, also won the 2018 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her research on popular performance in Belfast was awarded a 2020 Pitt Momentum Fund Seed Grant and ESC Faculty Research Grant.

Granshaw was honored to receive the University of Pittsburgh’s 2021 Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award (tenured category) and 2026 Eleanora Duse Society Graduate Mentoring Award.

She teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. She is affiliate faculty with the Global Studies Center, the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program, and Cultural Studies.

Granshaw currently serves as the President of the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS). She previously served on ATDS’s Executive Board (term 2021-5) and co-organized ATDS’s First Book Bootcamp (2022-4) and Career Conversations (2021-5). She also has served as the Theatre History Symposium Co-Chair for the Mid-America Theatre Conference (2015-7).

Granshaw received a 2026-7 ACLS Fellowship and will be on leave for the 2026-7 academic year.