Amy E. Hughes is Associate Professor of Theater History and Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Theater at Brooklyn College. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received ASTR's Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. She has published essays and reviews in Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of American Culture, and Theatre Journal, among others, and in four edited collections. She is now working on two separate but related book projects: a critical edition of the long-lost diary of nineteenth-century US American actor Harry Watkins, which she is co-editing with Naomi J. Stubbs (http://www.harrywatkinsdiary.org); and a book about how Watkins’s account offers an "alternative theater history" of pre-Civil War US American entertainment culture.