John Musser

John Musser holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is also an alum of the GSWS program at Pitt. His current research project is a genealogy of performance which looks at the figure of the diva in the 20th/21st century. Specifically, John is bringing together ideas from performance studies, aesthetic philosophy, queer theory, and critical race theory to think about how divas are pushing bodily understandings of queerness and race into new directions—through an evocation of the sublime. More broadly, John is interested in how performance has shaped our understanding of race and sexuality in the 20th/21st century. John is also an active queer performer, currently working on a stage production, The Diva Saga: The Legend of the Worst Drag Queen, in collaboration with Pittsburgh-based visual/multimedia artist Scott N. Andrew.