Office Location: 321 Allen
Office Phone: 919-684-3132
Email Address: smetzger@duke.edu

Office Hours:

Teaching in New York in Fall 07

Education and Interests:

PhD, University of California at Davis

Asian American literature; comparative drama; film and cultural studies; performance and queer theory; race, migration and sexuality

Sean Metzger is interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and national belonging as constructed through film, theatre and performance. Trained as a comparatist before moving his doctoral studies to a theatre department, Metzger continues to teach broadly in (and out of) the Western dramatic canon as well as late 19th-21st century American and Francophone literature and cinema. His writing focuses on Asian/American cultural production, with an emphasis on US-China relations and the Chinese diaspora. At Duke, Metzger is affiliated with the Asian/ Pacific Studies Institute, the Institute for Critical US Studies, the program in Film/Video/ Digital and the program in Women’s Studies as well as the departments of English and Theatre Studies. He is currently planning with Michaeline Crichlow a symposium called “Race, Space, Place: The Making and Unmaking of Freedoms in the Atlantic World And Beyond—Interdisciplinary Conversations,” to be held in the spring of 2007. Prior to his arrival in the South, Metzger served as adjunct faculty at Antioch University (BA program), Loyola Marymount University (departments of American Cultures and Theatre) and the USC School of Theatre. He also spent three years working in social services at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center and as an independent consultant to school districts and other non-profit institutions. A closeted actor and director, Metzger occasionally creeps on or behind stage.

Representative Publications   (More Publications)   (search)

1. S. Metzger. The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity; Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement; Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts.  American Literature 79.4 (December, 2007).
2. S. Metzger. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture and Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War.  American Literature 79.1 (March, 2007): 201-203.
3. with Gina Masequesmay. Embodying Asian/ American Sexualities.  under review
4. S. Metzger. "The Little (Chinese) Mermaid: Importing "Western" Femininity in Lou Ye's Suzhou he (Suzhou River)." How East Asian Films Are Reshaping National Identities: Essays on the Cinemas of China, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Ed. Andrew David Jackson, Michael Gibb, and Dave White. The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 135-154.
5.  Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s and From Inner Worlds to Outer Space: The Multimedia Performances of Dan Kwong.  TDR 50.192 (Winter, 2006).

English Home | A&S Home | Duke.edu | Other English Resources