Rosalind Kerr is Associate Professor of Dramatic Theory at the University of Alberta. She teaches, researches, and publishes across a range of disciplines that reflect her application of contemporary critical theories to the study of theatrical performance and its production and reception. Her research falls into two distinct areas of specialization linked by her particular interests in feminist and queer theatre/theory.  She combines her studies of the sixteenth-century Italian commedia dell’arte actresses and the impact that they had on shaping the early modern stage with her work on contemporary Canadian experimental and queer theatre. She also has experience as a dramaturg, actor and director.

Her current project with the working title, The Actress, the Fetish and the Fantasy (on the sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte Stage, is a manuscript that brings together her research on the early Italian actresses (1560-1610). It explores their novel presence in this commercial art form through multi-faceted theories of fetish and fantasy which bring complex historical, religious, sexual, psychic, economic, and social meanings into the discourse. It reads the rise of the actress through her conscious interactions with her fetishized presence in the new and fantastical theatrical form she helped to popularize. Reconstructions of the stage roles introduced by star actresses such as Isabella Andreini of the idealized “Renaissance woman,” including transvestite disguise, illustrate ways in which the theatre mass-marketed an early modern version of the white upscale bourgeois woman as the ultimate desirable sexualized commodity. It also reads the actresses as both in and outside the gendered constructions they were enacting from their first marketplace appearances as entertainers to their revered status as divas at the top of the profession. This project is being funded by a SHHRC Standard Research Grant, 2008-2011 ($78,326).

She recently edited Queer Theatre, Volume 7, of Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2007), which brings together key articles documenting the history of queer Canadian theatre as reflected by current theorists and artists. This publication follows on her edition of the first anthology of Canadian lesbian playwrights (Playwrights Canada Press, 2006), Lesbian Plays: Coming of Age in Canada. Featuring the work of twelve artists, the volume offers critical introductions to each of the plays in order to highlight ways in which they mark the increased profile that lesbians have achieved in Canadian society.

Earlier in 2002, she and Patricia Demers coedited  Staging Alternative Albertas: Experimental Drama in Edmonton, an anthology of one acts profiling local artists working outside traditional theatrical conventions. Her most recent excursion in directing was a collaborative piece with Vancouver performance artist Lisa Lowe and Calgarian scholar-musician Mary Polito entitled Mildred A. Horn, Sex-Hygienist, 1946.