Kellen Hoxworth
@kellenhoxworth.bsky.social
Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University at Buffalo - SUNY.
Author of “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance”: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147072/transoceanic-blackface/
Author of “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance”: https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147072/transoceanic-blackface/
We said goodbye to our 10 year-old puppy Nova this week.
He was our close companion ever since we rescued him when he was six months old. Across multiple moves (one cross-country) and major life events, he never left our sides.
He was the best boy, and he will be missed.
He was our close companion ever since we rescued him when he was six months old. Across multiple moves (one cross-country) and major life events, he never left our sides.
He was the best boy, and he will be missed.
September 20, 2025 at 7:40 PM
We said goodbye to our 10 year-old puppy Nova this week.
He was our close companion ever since we rescued him when he was six months old. Across multiple moves (one cross-country) and major life events, he never left our sides.
He was the best boy, and he will be missed.
He was our close companion ever since we rescued him when he was six months old. Across multiple moves (one cross-country) and major life events, he never left our sides.
He was the best boy, and he will be missed.
Walgreens is doing there part in the charade to deny access to care.
August 19, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Walgreens is doing there part in the charade to deny access to care.
Fund the humanities
![Screenshot of the New York Times Spelling Bee game showing it claiming that “canto” is “not in [the] word list.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4c6chvt3zqu3ort4o35esoql/bafkreifbsuwdfbdjjcgxzvwqegernp4mnosxumi3nzr5ard442ztbtor5a@jpeg)
July 30, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Fund the humanities
Live shot of the White House.
July 23, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Live shot of the White House.
*me and my book project
July 19, 2025 at 11:44 AM
*me and my book project
Credit for original post to @tomwalker.bsky.social:
July 11, 2025 at 8:22 AM
Credit for original post to @tomwalker.bsky.social:
Jealousy professor.
July 11, 2025 at 8:00 AM
Jealousy professor.
The erasure of bisexuality has gone too far.
May 30, 2025 at 10:33 AM
The erasure of bisexuality has gone too far.
I think I need to stage an intervention with my two year-old about his pine cone problem.
May 29, 2025 at 10:40 PM
I think I need to stage an intervention with my two year-old about his pine cone problem.
The article includes Porter’s statement that waivers are usually granted but that Pelosi didn’t grant hers.
May 29, 2025 at 5:13 PM
The article includes Porter’s statement that waivers are usually granted but that Pelosi didn’t grant hers.
Megan Lewis has reviewed Transoceanic Blackface in Theatre Journal. She writes: “[Hoxworth’s] degree of detail and excellent footnotes are models of historical performance research.”
May 8, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Megan Lewis has reviewed Transoceanic Blackface in Theatre Journal. She writes: “[Hoxworth’s] degree of detail and excellent footnotes are models of historical performance research.”
It will never surprise me to see confirmation that the Harper’s letter signatories are just world historical rubes.
April 28, 2025 at 11:18 AM
It will never surprise me to see confirmation that the Harper’s letter signatories are just world historical rubes.
The NYT Spelling Bee strikes again.
April 23, 2025 at 10:21 AM
The NYT Spelling Bee strikes again.
It is a truth (unfortunately not) universally acknowledged that any white figure from US history with “good” racial politics invariably also was at least a closet racist.
See pages 131-132 from my Transoceanic Blackface on John Quincy Adams’s racist critical commentary on Othello:
See pages 131-132 from my Transoceanic Blackface on John Quincy Adams’s racist critical commentary on Othello:
![P. 131 from Transocenic Blackface:
“By contrast to comic commentary that emphasized the humorousness British audiences found in the staging of blackened skin, Adams’s apprehension of the play fixated on the tragic potential of miscegenatory contact—Othello’s “touch[ing] the gentle Desdemona”—as a source of deep racial anxiety that overwhelmed her with physical revulsion.
John Quincy Adams evidently shared his mother’s affective response to the play. After his single term as president of the United States, Adams published a series of articles of Shakespearean criticism, including several on Othello wherein he rationalized his feelings of disgust at the sight of interracial contact as the purpose of the play. Despite Adams’s avowed abolitionism, he voiced profoundly antiblack interpretations of Shakespeare’s play, attributing his anxieties about the play to the figuration of Othello as a “rude, unbleached African soldier.” Visualizing interracial contact and the “intermingl[ing]” of “black and white blood” as the central dramatic crisis animating Othello, Adams articulated a contorted vein of criticism that posited the ostensible dangers of racial amalgamation as the “great moral lesson of the tragedy.” Throughout his essays, Adams explicitly outlined the ways in which sexuality animated Anglophone racial formations, castigating Desdemona for her “violations” of “Nature”—that is, of the Anglophone social and racial order. Adams substantiated this argument by emphasizing Desdemona’s willful entry into an interracial relationship with Othello. He viewed Desdemona as upending the decorum of courtship rituals because she acted as an agent in her own sexual life. Most “disgusting,” for Adams, was the physical contact between the Black Othello and the white Desdemona enacted “upon the stage.” In his view, this scene of interracial “fondling” figuratively expelled Desdemona from the family of respectable whiteness.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4c6chvt3zqu3ort4o35esoql/bafkreigox6hrexazy2tixutx5w5rsb67wcc7kenrj7sztq5xzcnst4z6ei@jpeg)
March 26, 2025 at 12:18 PM
It is a truth (unfortunately not) universally acknowledged that any white figure from US history with “good” racial politics invariably also was at least a closet racist.
See pages 131-132 from my Transoceanic Blackface on John Quincy Adams’s racist critical commentary on Othello:
See pages 131-132 from my Transoceanic Blackface on John Quincy Adams’s racist critical commentary on Othello:
Sandra Graham reviewed Transoceanic Blackface in CHOICE, praising my “unraveling of the dense intertextuality among blackface performances” as “virtuosic.”
March 14, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Sandra Graham reviewed Transoceanic Blackface in CHOICE, praising my “unraveling of the dense intertextuality among blackface performances” as “virtuosic.”