Kim Marra, Professor of American Studies and Theatre Arts (with affiliate status in Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) has been named a Collegiate Fellow by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

A Collegiate Teaching Award recipient, she teaches and conducts interdisciplinary research in theatre and performance history, pursuing feminist and queer analyses of how embodied performances function in various cultural contexts. Her prize-winning books and articles have examined the leading impresario-actress relationships that shaped modern Broadway, closeted LGBTQ potentates in pre-Stonewall U.S. theatre history, and the pull of horses across various theatrical and social stages in Manhattan circa 1900. A former board member of the American Society for Theatre Research, Marra is currently associate editor of the Animal Lives Series of the University of Chicago Press and co-director of the Summer Institute in Human-Animal Studies jointly sponsored by the international Animals and Society Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has served as DEO of American Studies and as a member of the Collegiate Consulting Group and CLAS Executive Committee. She was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2010.

Collegiate Fellow, the college’s highest faculty honor, is given in recognition of their distinguished teaching, research, and service. It is a renewable five-year appointment.