Aaron C. Thomas
Associate Professor
Director, BA Theatre Program
School of Theatre
Aaron C. Thomas is an associate professor in the School of Theatre and director of the School’s BA program. His major research area is theatrical discourse surrounding sexuality and violence, and he writes primarily about images of violent masculinity in contemporary culture. As an antidote to writing about violence, he also writes extensively in the field of musical theatre studies, where his work focuses on theatrical discourse surrounding sexuality, masculinity, and violence.
Dr. Thomas is the author of Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics (2023) and Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (2018). His current book project, The Violate Man, interrogates images of male/male sexual violence in U.S. American popular culture since the 1960s. He has published articles in American Theatre, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Theater, QED: a Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Theatre Topics, and he has additional work published in Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, and Cultural Studies. He is currently the Associate Editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism where he edited the special section Drag vs. the Law in 2024.
From 2010-2020, Dr. Thomas was also the Literary Manager at Endstation Theatre Company in Central Virginia, where he directed plays and worked in dramaturgy and new play development.
Contact and Files
Education
BA Theatre Arts, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, 2003
MA Theatre Studies, Florida State University, 2008
PhD Theatre Studies, Florida State University, 2012
Publications – Books
Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010-2020 , (Routledge, 2023).
Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, (Routledge, 2018).
Publications – Articles and Book Chapters
• “Drag vs. the Law Special Section”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 38.2 (2024)
• “‘Against Interpretation’: Actor-Driven Shakespeare and a Love for Scholarship”, Shakespeare Bulletin 42.1 (2024)
• “Is He… You Know…”, Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Atkins, (Routledge, 2023)
• “Infelicities”, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 35.2 (2021)
• “The Pink Elephant in the Room”, The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, edited by Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman, (Routledge, 2019)
• “Truth and Translation at the Heart of Violence”, Theater 49.2 (2019)
• “Music for Charlie Morel”, “A Happy Life”, etc., Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, edited by Daniel Sack, (Routledge, 2017)
• “Dancing toward Masculinity: Newsies, Gender, and Desire”, The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Perspectives from Snow White to Frozen, edited by George Rodosthenous, (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017)
• “My Father’s Pulse”, QED: a Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3.3 (2016)
• “Property Brothers”, American Theatre 33.3 (2016)
• “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red”, Modern Drama 58.4 (2015)
• Aaron C. Thomas and Angela Sweigart-Gallagher, “The Location’s the Thing: Endstation Theatre and Dramaturgies of Place”, Theatre Topics 25.1 (2015)
• “Viewing the Pornographic Theatre: Explicit Voyeurism, Artaud, and Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella”, Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasure of Watching, edited by George Rodosthenous, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
• “The Queen’s Cell: Fortune and Men’s Eyes and the New Prison Drama”, Theatre Survey 55.2 (2014)
• “Engaging an Icon: Caroline, or Change and the Politics of Representation”, Studies in Musical Theatre 4.2 (2010)