2023
Amy Cook cites “Infelicities” in her article for TDR 67.4: “Aaron Thomas rigorously and helpfully explains just how confused and confusing this term has become, even among those of us in theatre and performance studies: ‘There has been an extraordinary and puzzling laxity around uses of this word by editors and journals in the field so that performative has become not only hard to pin down, as Schechner would have it, but, as I argue here, consistently and reliably infelicitous.’ Thomas prompts us to think more about “how is this performative?” rather than to state that something is performative: What can we say about works of art when we see how some can be performative?”

2023
Sarah Balkin cites “Infelicities” in her article “On Quitting: Dave Chappelle’s The Closer and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette” in TDR 67.1. The article engages with my interest in performances that fail, playfully puns on my title, and engages with my idea that “our very desire for felicitous performatives” might “be working to obscure the manifold possibilities of performance as such.”

2023
Molly Higgins mentions Love Is Love Is Love as a March 2023 “Must Read” on the Playbill website along with Ben Francis’s Sondheim book, Careful the Spell You Cast, Seth Rudetsky’s Musical Theatre for Dummies, and Sheryl Lee Ralph’s autobiography, Diva 2.0.

2022
In his discussion of A Raisin in the Sun (chapter 13), Paul Thifault cites my reading of Lena Younger’s plant as a figure for the African Diaspora in the United States, and he footnotes my argument against interpretations of the play as about middle-class dreams of home ownership.

2022
Anouk Bottero cites “Engaging an Icon” in her discussion of the way stillness functions in Jeanine Tesori and Tony Kushner’s musical Caroline, or Change in her article “Paradoxes of Stillness in Caroline, or Change” in the journal Studies in Musical Theatre 16.3.

2022
Michelle Liu Carriger, chair of the 2022 Outstanding Article Award committee for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, interviews me about my article “Infelicities”. I speak about the article’s genesis, some of its main arguments, and my feelings.

2022
Yizhou Huang cites “Infelicities” to describe her use of the word performative (it’s a Conquergood use) in her article “Critical Ambiguity: the Performance of Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, 2017-2018” in the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias 8.2.

2021
Pannill Camp, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Leticia Ridley, and Jordan Ealey discuss (as their first segment of the pod) the #PerformativeX special section in JDTC. Pannill and Sarah both refer back to their arguments about this on episode 032, and Pannill gives me a specific shout-out, calling my essay “Infelicities” “super super useful,” and saying, “Having read what he says about uses of ‘the performative’ on Twitter I expected this to be kind of a rant. It’s not a rant. It’s an extremely rigorous methodical survey of the different ways that the term performative has been used in our field.”

2021
In the August 15th issue of Brian Eugenio Herrera’s weekly newsletter he says some lovely things about my essay “Infelicities”. He calls my essay a “fascinating (and expert) excavation of the unruly, unkempt genealogy of “the performative” — as both critical keyword and term of intellectual art — [that] allows us to anchor current certitudes over the word’s meaning in the often surprising complexities of the past.”

2021
I appear on episode 21 of Jennifer Sassaman and Ricardo Frederick Evans’ podcast Read More Plays to talk about Robert O’Hara’s play Bootycandy and how hilarious it is. It was great to be able to talk about how brilliant this play is and how wonderfully it references Black theatre history and asks fascinating questions about sexuality.

2020
Hansol Oh discusses spectacularized labor and the anthropomorphized appliances in Caroline, or Change and cites my article “Engaging an Icon” in his article “‘Doing Housework Doing Laundry’: Spectacularization of Labor in Caroline, or Change” for the journal Platform, vol. 14.

2020
In the Winter issue of Modern Drama, Kelsey Kiser uses my essay “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” as a kind of jumping off point for her argument about Hansberry’s portrayal of the domestic sphere as a space of counter-surveillance. Kiser’s article is entitled “The Domestic Sphere as Counter-surveillance in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun“, and she gives me a nod by titling one of her subheadings “Reading A Raisin in the Sun as Red”

2020
David Kimple interviewed me for the December 28 issue of his weekly newsletter gangletown. The interview is included in his issue “Summing Up 2020”, in which he asks me about the annual “Summing Up” post I put on my (mostly movie-centered) blog Tea to Pour. David also calls me gorgeous. It’s a very sweet interview.

2020
Anna Watkins Fisher footnotes my essay “Viewing the Pornographic Theatre: Explicit Voyeurism, Artaud, and Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella” in her new book out from Duke University Press as one example of theatre scholarship’s interest in the work of Ann Liv Young.

2020
Robert Gutierrez-Perez’s essay is about how to write through overwhelming grief and how the work of Gloria Anzaldúa helps us grieve. The subject of grief in Gutierrez-Perez’s piece is the Orlando Pulse shootings, and he footnotes my essay “My Father’s Pulse”.

2020
Pavithra Prasad cites an idea from “My Father’s Pulse” in her piece “In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief” for the Spring 2020 (7.1) issue of QED: a Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking as she thinks about chosen families, biological families, and queer kinship experienced through loss.

2020
Alexandra Kolb cites my book chapter “Viewing the Pornographic Theatre” in her essay in Dance Chronicle 43.1. Her essay critically interrogates the trend toward the exposure of intimate life and sexuality in performance by examining Pina Bausch’s Window Washer (1997) and Michael Parmenter’s A Long Undressing (1995), and she cites my assessment of Ann-Liv Young’s Cinderella to discuss the possibilities of the pornographic.

2019
Julie Burrell cites my article “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” in her book Staging Freedom: the Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939–1966. Burrell’s book appears in the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series.

2019
Director Noam Shapiro cites the last section of my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd in the notes for his production of Sweeney at the Yale Dramatic Association in late November 2019: “To many, Sweeney Todd depicts a world in which everything bends towards destruction. But, as Sondheim scholar Aaron C. Thomas reminds us, the musical is also a fable—the ‘Ballad’ insists on this—and it’s a story that has been told countless times and with different variations across generations. Thinking about the show as the repetition of a tragic ritual opens up a space for hope: The tale can be told differently. Perhaps the next time we feel the pull of the violence that we’ve ritualized as a society we will simply say no. It’s in our power to break the cycle. But there’s work to be done, so much work.”

2019
This article for the Lynchburg News and Advance takes a decidedly obnoxious tone (referring to The Sea Voyage as “hella old”), but I was happy to speak to The Burg about Jacobean Theatre, Renaissance comedy, and my friend Patrick Earl’s production of John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s play at Randolph College.

2019
In the Studies in Musical Theatre (13.2) special issue on the work of Stephen Sondheim, Robert Gordon includes my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd and Olaf Jubin’s book Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods in his overview of recent Sondheim scholarship. (pp. 197-204)

2019
Donatella Galella cites my article “Watching Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” in her discussion of Lorraine Hansberry in chapter four of America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, entitled “Cultivating Raisin and the Popular Black Musical”.

2019
Danica Čerče cites my piece “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” heavily in her article “Race and Politics in the Twentieth-century Black American Play: Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun”, which appears in issue 46 of the journal Neohelicon.

2019
Pannill Camp, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and Harvey Young discuss (as their third segment of the pod) my constant griping about the confusing misuse and abuse of the term performative by scholars in the field of theatre and performance studies to mean something akin to the word theatrical.

2018
I was interviewed for The Burg, also known as Lynchburg’s News and Advance, about director Dustin Williams’ production of Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The piece, by Emma Schkloven, includes a good deal of information found in the first chapter of my book Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd.

2018
I was interviewed for The Burg, also known as Lynchburg’s News and Advance, about As You Like It, my work for Endstation Theatre Company, and dramaturgy in general. This piece also contains a really lovely portrait and some great photos of us rehearsing in our outdoor space.

2018
This a promotional article on Broadway World Miami describing Nicky Wood’s one-man show Yes Sir, That’s My Broadway at the Barn Theatre in Stuart, FL. Nicky gives me a shout-out as one of his inspirational and passionate theatre history teachers. What a sweetheart!

2017
Sarah Orem cites “Watching A Raisin in the Sun and Seeing Red” in her article “Signifyin(g) When Vexed: Black Feminist Revision, Anger, and A Raisin in the Sun” in Modern Drama 60.2 (Summer 2017).

2017
For Samuel French’s Breaking Character Magazine. This is a roundtable interview about the continuing importance of the playwright Joe Orton. David Kimple interviewed producers David Dreyfoos and Annie Keefe, performer Kate Reynolds, and me.

2017
For NSM Today, a UCF student publication, I was given the opportunity to discuss Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s work, linking her piece Pieta to performances in which mothers grieve for their children onstage throughout theatre history. The piece was written by Desiree Montilla.

2016
Maria Tsouvala & Katia Savrami cite my chapter on explicit performance and Ann Liv Young’s Cinderella in their piece “The Human Body in Contemporary Dance: from Costumes to Nakedness” which appears in Critical Stages/Scènes Critiques issue 13 (June 2016).

2016
Nick Salvato very generously cites a talk I gave in 2014 entitled “In Search of a Culture That Isn’t Appropriate/d” in his (truly brilliant) book Obstruction from Duke University Press.

2016
For volume 1, issue 1 of PARtake: the Journal of Performance as Research, Lynn Deboeck makes an argument about the way that reviewers performatively (?) construct phantom audiences in their reviews. Her chief object of study in the article is the performance reviews section of Theatre Journal 68.1, edited by Daniel Sack, in which I have a piece on Matthew Aucoin’s opera Crossing. The author discusses my piece extensively (pp. 4-6).

2016
UCF’s student paper NSM Today did a story on our reading and discussion of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The article includes a fun picture of me and the students on the Clybourne Park set during the post-show discussion.

2013
L. Bailey McDaniel cites my essay “Engaging an Icon” in her book (Re)constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-century American Drama from Palgrave Macmillan. Her book’s third chapter is about mammies and sexuality in Cheryl West’s Jar the Floor, Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, and Tony Kushner & Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change, and so she cites my discussion of Caroline’s sexuality in that musical.