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Theatre History Expert to Chair Theatre Arts

There is a new directing member of the cast in the Department of Theatre Arts. Sarah J. Blackstone brings dual abilities in scholarship and in art to her role as department chair. Her work in educational theatre has prepared her as both a leader who can facilitate communication and an artistic director who can foster creativity.

About the connection between her work in educational theatre and her scholarship, Blackstone says, "I believe working in educational theatre offers unique opportunities to create synergies between thinking and writing, and creating works of art. We inform our imaginations by using tools of good scholarship. We not only act as artists, we reflect on our own and others' work to discover new ideas, techniques, and approaches to our art."

Blackstone comes to CSU, Chico from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIUC) where she was chair of the Department of Theatre. During her nine-year tenure at SIUC, she not only chaired the department, but also served as director of graduate studies. She taught, directed theatre productions, and studied, inventoried, and catalogued the Sherman Theatre Collection at SIUC's Morris Library.

The Sherman Collection, a major collection of some 4,000 nineteenth-century melodrama scripts, was an unexpected find for Blackstone at SIUC. Since the 1960s, the collection had remained untouched in boxes stacked in the library's storage facility until Blackstone's arrival. Fueled by her interest in nineteenth-century entertainment, Blackstone took on the task of organizing the manuscripts. She describes the collection's importance: "It is huge -- the biggest collection I know of. Melodrama was the TV of the nineteenth century." The Sherman Collection is now open to researchers through Special Collections at the Morris Library.

Blackstone obtained her Ph.D. in theatre history from Northwestern University and her M.A. in theatre from Kansas State University. A native of Laramie, Wyoming, she was honored as an Exemplary Alumnae of the University of Wyoming's College of Arts and Sciences, from which she graduated with honors. She was also named a University Faculty Woman of Distinction at Southern Illinois in 1996. Her teaching interests and specialties are American theatre history and drama, nineteenth-century popular entertainment, contemporary British theatre, and twentieth-century European theatre history.

She is the author of two books on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill's Wild West and The Business of Being Buffalo Bill: Selected Letters of William F. Cody 1879-1917. She explains her interest in Cody, "His Wild West shows were theatrical spectacles seen by millions of people. These shows were largely responsible for creating the [fictional] images we still associate with the Ôwinning' of the West -- the popular view of cowboys and Indians. In truth, there were very few battles of the kind Cody orchestrated. The Native Americans had been removed to reservations before cattle were brought to most of the West." Author Larry McMurtry used Blackstone's research on William Cody in an article, "Inventing the West," published in The New York Review, August 2000. -- JM