As a theater historian, my research focuses on the history of race and integration on the American stage in the mid-20th Century. I am interested in how, in the decades leading up to the dramatic changes of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement (roughly, 1920s-early 1960s), artists used theater and performance to advocate for racial justice and promote interracial collaboration, dialogue, and understanding.
Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement
University of Michigan Press, 2025Starting in 1966, African American activist Stokely Carmichael and other political leaders adopted the phrase "Black Power!" The slogan captured a militant, revolutionary spirit that was already emerging in the work of playwrights, poets, musicians, and visual artists throughout the Black Arts movement of the mid-1960s. But the story of those theater artists and performers whose work helped bring about the Black Arts revolution has not fully been told. Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post-World War II to the Black Arts Movement explores the dynamic era of Black culture between the end of World War II and the start of the Black Arts Movement (1946-1964) by illuminating how artists and innovators such as Jackie Robinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, and others helped radicalize Black culture and Black political thought. In doing so, these artists defied white cultural hegemony in the United States, and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid 1960s. Through archival research, close textual reading, and an analysis of performance artifacts, Shandell demonstrates how these artists negotiated a space on the public stage for cultivating radical Black aesthetics and built the foundation for the revolutionary movement in Black theater that followed in the mid-1960s.
Official site (University of Michigan Press)
The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era
University of Iowa Press, 2018The first in-depth study of the historic American Negro Theatre (ANT) and its lasting influence on American popular culture.
Official site (University of Iowa Press)
Experiments in Democracy:
Interracial and Cross-Cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912-1945
Scholarly anthology (co-edited with Cheryl Black) that examines how US artists fostered interracial collaboration and socialization on stage, behind the scenes, and among audiences.
Click here to hear me talk about my research and my book The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era on the podcast "New Books in African American Studies."
Cambridge Companion to
African American Theatre
Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama
Ed. David Palmer (Bloomsbury, 2018)Authentic Blackness/
"Real" Blackness
My publications include articles in these journals: Theatre History Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, African American Review, and others.