Dramatic Criticism's Imperial Ambitions: Brander Matthews and the Establishment of Theatre in US Higher Education

The paradigm through which theatre entered higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defined by the ways in which US scholars were embracing the emergence of the United States as a global power. US imperial aspirations were ones largely shared by the white men of the academy and they invented an approach to scholarship that enhanced and complemented those aspirations. As they defined notions of the professional...