Dr. Amy E. Hughes (Co-Editor) is Associate Professor of Theater History and Criticism at Brooklyn College (CUNY). She brings to this project technical skills developed at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents (coordinated by the Association for Documentary Editing) as well as expertise in antebellum US theater and culture. Her first book, Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2012), received the 2013 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). The book investigates the relationship between the theater and visual, print, and material media in order to illuminate how spectacle was central to the “dramaturgy of reform” in the antebellum United States. Her essays and reviews have appeared in J19: Journal of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of American Culture, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics as well as four edited collections. In addition to serving as co-editor of A Player and a Gentleman, she is writing a monograph inspired by Watkins’s diary, An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in Nineteenth-Century US America, which explores how Watkins’s account constitutes an “alternative theater history” centered on workaday labor. For more information, visit her web page.