DR. WEBSTER MCDONALD

Dr. Webster McDonald is a Jamaican artist-scholar-educator. He holds a BFA in Theatre Arts from Edna Manley College, an MA in Theatre Education and Community from Emerson College, and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Kansas (2024). His dissertation focuses on Michael Rothberg’s concepts of “multidirectional memory” and “implicated subjects,” offering a framework for studying the disavowal of queer lives. He has taught various performance and theory courses and has been a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University. Dr. McDonald’s research theorizes within critical Black studies, critical decolonial performance-making, post-colonialism, reflexive auto-ethnography, and Black queer theory. He is a co-author of Dubbin Monodrama Anthology I : Black Masculinities in African Diaspora Theatre(2019) and has published the essay “Scripts of Sexual Ethics: Tensions With/In the Performance of Jamaican Citizenship” (2023) in Caribbean Studies, exploring the complexities of sexual ethics in Jamaican national identity. He joins Northwestern University's Slippage lab as a 2024-2025 Postdoctoral Scholar, currently working alongside Professor Thomas DeFrantz on the Mellon-funded research on Black social dance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Harlem, Detroit, and Minneapolis.