Biography

Emily Roxworthy is a scholar-artist with degrees in theatre arts, literature, and performance studies from Cornell University (MA) and Northwestern University (BS and PhD). She was formerly on the Theatre & Dance faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where she also served as Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty Diversity & Equity, Provost of Earl Warren College, and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. Her research and creative interests include roleplay training, intercultural theatre, digital media, and performance in higher education.

Dr. Roxworthy is the founder and artistic director of Workplace Interactive Theatre (WIT), a theatre company that emerged from a 2014 University of California Office of the President’s commission to create diversity training for all chairs and deans on the ten UC campuses using documentary theatre-based improvisational workshops. She is also the creator of an educational video game prototype that was twice funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH); based on her historical research, Drama in the Delta recreates life in one of the Japanese American internment camps from World War II using digital roleplay technology.

Dr. Roxworthy’s first book, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity in World War II, was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2008 and received the Barnard Hewitt Award Honorable Mention from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Her second book, The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas, was published by Routledge in 2020. Her scholarly articles have received research awards from ASTR and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and she was the recipient of a 2012 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and a 2015 Inclusive Excellence Award from UC San Diego.