Michelle Liu Carriger specializes in the historiography of theater, performance and everyday life. Formerly a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, her current research concentrates on clothing and performance of self in everyday 19th century life in Britain and Japan, as well as how clothing and fashion can themselves serve as historiographical methods for maintaining bodily links to the past. She attends especially to the ways in which notions of theatricality in clothing and fashion simultaneously articulate and mystify the discourses of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and modernity in their work upon bodies. Professor Carriger’s first article excerpted from this work, “The Unnatural History and Petticoat Mystery of Boulton and Park: A Victorian Sex Scandal and the Theatre Defense,” won the 2012 TDR (The Drama Review) Graduate Student Essay Contest Award and appears in the December 2013 issue of TDR.

As a long-time practitioner of the Japanese Way of Tea (“tea ceremony”), including a yearlong Midorikai fellowship at the Urasenke Gakuen Professional College of Chado, Professor Carriger is at work on a second project on tea as a contemporary practice of historical embodiment and cultural performance. Performance work includes dramaturgy and directing at Brown University and the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as devised performances and short films with collaborators Molly Flynn and Elise Morrison under the moniker Cabaret Murderess.

Professor Carriger received her master of arts degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and completed her Ph.D. in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies from Brown University.