Dr. James S. Moy
Professor of Theatre
Theatre Studies
(813) 974-2701
Email: moy@usf.edu
After training as a studio artist, Moy went on to graduate study at Cal Arts where he became interested in happenings and performance art. This led him to complete advanced studies in stage direction and eventually a third degree with a dual focus on playwriting and performance history with Professor Barnard Hewitt. For his third degree, Moy trained as a specialist in pre-twentieth century popular culture, and eventually wrote a dissertation on the late eighteenth century American circus. Possessing a voracious curiosity about all things visual, Moy is attracted to interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and experimental modes of inquiry. Beyond Moy's training as a studio painter, his engagement with the visual arts has included work as a photographic technician in a transmission electron microscopy laboratory, writer for industrial films and trade shows, photographer in a creative agency, and involvement in technology transfers of scientific visualization techniques (RAVE) for use in art environments.
Moy's interdisciplinary research focus eventually led to interrogations of the practice of racial representation in America. Accordingly, his book Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (1993) offers readings of plays in production, film, performance art, photographs, anthropological displays, cartoons, acrobatic acts, and museums. He has published over forty scholarly articles and reviews in refereed journals. Moy has lectured internationally from Nanjing and Hong Kong to Ulan Ude, Stockholm, Venice, Edinburgh, Thessaloniki, Tampere, London, etc.
Moy is a former editor of Theatre Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has contributed to curatorial teams for gallery exhibitions, including an International Center for Photography show in New York City of photographs relating to race entitled "Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self" (12-12-03 to 2-29-04). He recently participated as an invited panelist in "The Modern / Postmodern Dialectic: American Art and Culture, 1965-2000," an innovative on-line symposium moderated by Maurice Berger, and cosponsored by The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (New School University, NYC) and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center (Santa Fe). Moy continues to serve on panels and convenings for the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and various American educational and accreditation organizations.
He is most proud of his students. Recently, two of Moy's Ph.D. dissertators were awarded Fulbright Fellowships to conduct research abroad. And, his former students serve on the faculties of Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Iowa, Catholic University, The Ohio State University, University of California (San Diego, Santa Cruz, Irvine, and Riverside), College of Holy Cross, and many others across America and abroad.
Moy has taught at the University of Texas (Austin), the University of Oregon, and Northwestern University. He was Chair / Professor with the Department of Theater and Drama at the University of Wisconsin鈥擬adison, a program he served for over twenty years. In 2003 he left the University of Wisconsin to become Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico a post he vacated to join the administration of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. He subsequently returned to North America to serve as Dean of Fine Art at Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and Provost, Vice President Academic and Research at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD) before moving to a Florida Professorship and the Decanal post at the 最新天美传媒.
Academic Qualifications: PhD in Theatre History and Playwriting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; MA & BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.