Assistant Professor, History Literature
Ph.D. Ethnomusicology University of Pittsburgh
M.M. Ethnomusicology University of Wisconsin Madison
B. Ed (Music) University of Melbourne
Gillian Rodger’s on-going research interests cluster around popular musical theater of nineteenth-century America and working-class popular culture. She is exploring the early history of variety theater (the form that preceded vaudeville) and its connections to other musical theater forms including minstrelsy and burlesque. In a recently published article in the journal American Music, she examines theater law in New York State, showing how variety theaters were run, and, indeed, how what could appear on their stages was shaped to a large extent by changes to theater law and the threat of police raids. Her article, “’He isn’t a marrying man’: Gender and Sexuality in the Repertoire of Male Impersonators, 1870-1920," reveals that until the 1890s or later, female-to-male cross-dressed performances were intended to subvert class rather than gender or sexuality. Dr. Rodger’s work on popular culture extend to the present, and a forthcoming essay in Popular Music examines the performance strategy employed by the Scottish singer Annie Lennox, arguing that this performer employs tactics not unlike those of nineteenth-century character singers in her approach to music, and through this performance provides an on-going and cutting critique of gender.
In all of her work Rodger focuses on song and singing, and particularly on song as a dramatic moment. She argues that in non-narrative theater--that is, theater without a linking or overarching narrative structure--song functions to provide narrative periods in the performer’s act. Popular songs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied heavily on stereotypical characters and scenarios and the skills of the performers were instrumental in bringing these songs to life.