Academic Historian

Michelle Granshaw is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. She is affiliate faculty with the Global Studies Center, the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program, and Cultural Studies. At Pitt, she teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. Granshaw was honored to receive the University of Pittsburgh’s 2021 Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award.

As a cultural historian, her research focuses on disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. Her research interests include U.S. theatre, popular entertainment, and performance; performances of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; global and diasporic performance; and historiography.

Granshaw’s articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal. In 2014, Granshaw was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for her Theatre Survey (January 2014) article “The Mysterious Victory of the Newsboys: The Grand Duke Theatre’s 1874 Challenge to the Theatre Licensing Law.” Her book, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) argues that nineteenth-century American variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and ethnic community in the United States. It was named a finalist for the 2019 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Book Award and supported by grants and fellowships including the Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, American Theatre and Drama Society Faculty Travel Award, and Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship. “Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage,” part of Irish on the Move’sfirst chapter, also won the 2018 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Currently, she is working on a new monograph titled The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War. In November 2022, she received an American Society for Theatre Research Research Fellowship in support of the project.

Granshaw currently serves on the Executive Board for the American Theatre and Drama Society (term 2021-5) and co-organizes ATDS’s First Book Bootcamp and Career Conversations series.

William Attaway (1911-1986)

William Attaway, writer and composer, was born in Greenville, Mississippi. His mother, Florence Parry Attaway, worked as a teacher and his father, William Alexander Attaway, was a doctor who helped create the National Negro Insurance Association. In the 1910s, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois. … Read MoreWilliam Attaway (1911-1986)

Powell Lindsay (1905-1987)

Powell Lindsay, actor, director, playwright, and producer, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  He attended Virginia Union University as well as the Yale University School of Drama.  At Yale, Lindsay became frustrated by the limited and often stereotypical African American roles presented by the School of … Read MorePowell Lindsay (1905-1987)

Earl “Bud” Powell (1924-1966)

Bud Powell, jazz pianist, was born Earl Powell in New York City.  His father, William Powell, worked as a building superintendent. Powell grew up surrounded by musicians, including his father, who played piano, his brother William, who played trumpet and violin, and his brother Richie, … Read MoreEarl “Bud” Powell (1924-1966)

William Everett “Billy” Preston (1946-2006)

Billy Preston, singer and musician, was born William Everett Preston in 1946 in Houston, Texas.  He lived in Houston, Texas until his family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1949.  Working as Victory Baptist Church’s organist, his mother, Robbie Preston Williams, supported Preston, his sister … Read MoreWilliam Everett “Billy” Preston (1946-2006)

Caroline Still Wiley Anderson (1848-1919)

Caroline Still Wiley Anderson, physician and educator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to William and Letitia Still.  Supporting his family through coal mining investments and a stove store, William Still, a prominent antebellum abolitionist, helped escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.  He wrote about these … Read MoreCaroline Still Wiley Anderson (1848-1919)

Earl Hilliard (1942- )

Earl Hilliard, lawyer, politician, and United States Representative from Alabama’s Seventh Congressional District (1993-2003), was born in Birmingham, Alabama to parents Iola Frazier and William Hilliard in 1942.  Growing up in a segregated neighborhood Hilliard graduated from Western-Olin High School in 1960 and then attended … Read MoreEarl Hilliard (1942- )

Cleo Fields (1962- )

Cleo Fields, politician, lawyer, and United States Representative from Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District (1993-97), was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on November 22, 1962.  At four years old, Fields lost his father, Isidore Fields, a dockworker, in a car crash. His mother, Alice Fields, supported … Read MoreCleo Fields (1962- )