David Gardner (BA, English, Duke University) works on the intersections of theater and the novel in antebellum America, with particular interests in African American studies, gender and sexuality, and performance studies. His dissertation, "Theater in the Novel: The Dramaturgy of American Fiction in the Age of Edwin Forrest," traces the presence of figures from antebellum theater--blackface performers, actresses, star actors, and rowdy audiences--in the novels of Melville, Hawthorne, Fern, and Lippard, among others. At Penn he has taught or assisted in courses on Musical Theater, Shakespeare, and Modernist and Post-Modernist Drama, and in 2011-2012 he will teach seminars on Moby-Dick and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as an introductory literature course for Penn's Pre-Freshmam Program. He also teaches composition courses at Community College of Philadelphia, where he has focused on such writers as Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, and Rachel Carson. In 2010-2011 David co-coordinated Penn's American Literature Reading Group, and in 2011-2012 he will be both a Teaching Fellow for Penn's Critical Writing Program and an Andrew W Mellon Research Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum. David also works as a Production Dramaturg for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia.