Rachel Moss

Rachel Merrill Moss (she/her) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater at Colgate University. A theater historian, dramaturg, critic, and performer, Rachel recently earned her doctorate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, with research supported by a 2018-2019 Fulbright fellowship in Poland. Her research centers on the performance of Jewish material, identities, and tropes within and outside of theatre and their complex entwinement within broader socio-political narratives in context. Her current book project examines the past century of performed Jewishness in Poland, looking to the ways in which shifting representations of Jewishness from the interwar to post-communist periods engage with changing modes of national identity formation and narratives, politics, and memory work.

In 2022, Rachel was awarded the New Scholars’ Prize by the International Federation for Theatre Research. She regularly convenes the Central East European and Eurasian-focused Working Session at the American Society for Theatre Research and has also presented her at work at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the American and British Associations for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Rachel’s writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Survey, AJS Review, Culture.pl, and Színház. Rachel is co-editor with Debra Caplan of The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play that Possessed the World (University of Michigan Press, Fall 2023). As an educator, she has lectured in a range of locations including Chicago, New York City, Edinburgh, Ho Chi Minh City, and Warsaw, and most recently, in the Boston University School of Theatre.

As a practitioner, Rachel served as company and assistant general manager, and producing associate at the Barrow Street Theatre, a commercial off-Broadway theatre in NYC’s West Village, published nearly fifty New York theatre reviews between Theatre is Easy and NYTheatre.com, produced and reviewed work at multiple Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, and worked as a freelance dramaturg in NYC. From 2019-2020, she co-devised and performed in the Warsaw-based theatre company Strefa WolnaSłowa’s Azyl Warszawa projects, focusing on the dynamics of Poles and migrant experiences in Poland. In December 2020, she co-created and facilitated Dybuk na stulecie, an online and Warsaw-based centenary celebration in honor of S. Anski’s The Dybbuk, in partnership with Poland’s Instytut Teatralny. Most recently, Rachel served as the dramaturg for the New York City premiere of Tadeusz Słobodzianek's Our Class, directed by Igor Golyak (at BAM as part of the Under the Radar Festival, Jan-Feb 2024).