Martin Harries

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Martin Harries is an associate professor of English at New York University (NYU), where he teaches courses on theater, modernism, and theory. He is the author of numerous articles and reviews and of two books, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (Fordham University Press, 2007) and Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Harries will explore the impact that film has had on theater, looking especially at a variety of figures in post–World War II Europe and America, including Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Tennessee Williams. He will not examine questions of adaptation or theater’s dwindling audience—areas in which the influence of film on theater is demonstrable. Rather, he will study how film influenced the form of theater. How, for instance, did theater need to reimagine its spectator in light of the real or presumed place of the spectator of film? Theater became modern, Harries argues, precisely in its response to the mass culture of film and, to a lesser but still important extent, radio and political spectacle. This work is supported by the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars, awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies.

Harries received his PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and his AB in English from Columbia University. He is a member of the Modern Language Association. A Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities supported his graduate work. Before teaching at NYU, he was on the faculty at Princeton University.