Description:

Harvey Young, Theatre, School of Communication

Dr. Young received an EDGS Research grant in March 2015 to perform research at the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which remembers the approximately 14,000 people who passed through the converted prison before being killed by the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s. Although there are several scholarly studies of Tuol Sleng in print, this project expands the conversation by exploring community outreach and education initiatives which seek to teach Phnom Penh residents, the majority of whom were born after the ascendance (and fall) of the Khmer Rouge, about their history. It asks: how can a museum and a research center raise the political awareness and activity of its visitors by revealing the atrocities of the past?

Dr. Harvey Young’s research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle of Higher Education and cited in The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience, winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research and, most recently, Black Theater is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater (coauthored with Mecca Zabriskie). Dr. Young has served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for Theatre Research, the Yale Club of Chicago, and the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago. A former Harvard and Stanford fellow, he graduated with honors from Yale and holds a Ph.D. from Cornell. He is currently President-elect of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the largest association dedicated to college/university theatre with nearly 2,000 members, and the editor of Theatre Survey, the journal of the American Society for Theatre Research.