Theatre of the Vitrine: Materializing the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University

This article tracks the history of the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University, an archive endowed by the nation's first Professor of Dramatic Literature that helped to constitute theatre studies as an independent discipline, and theorizes its material manifestations on the Columbia campus from 1911 until its dissolution in 1971. The museum's history demonstrates how campus geographies prove consequential for the conceptual territory of theatre and performance scholarship. The essay thus reconceives of theatre historiography as a practice encoded in the physical environments of scholarly labor, transpiring not only in a discursive field but also in the material field of the university.