Jill Dolan is the Annan Professor in English and Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She directed Princeton’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies from 2009-2015 and served as the Dean of the College from 2015-2024.
Dolan began teaching at Princeton in 2008, arriving from the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the endowed Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance’s MA/MFA/PhD program in Performance as a Public Practice from 1999-2008. The program was the first in the country to consider the ramifications of performance’s efficacy across social practices.
Dolan received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog, “The Feminist Spectator.” She was among a handful of women to win the award and hers was the first blog to be so honored. In 2013, Palgrave Macmillan published her book, The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist Criticism on Stage and Screen, which collects 20 of her blog posts and includes 10 new essays, as well as an extended introduction and a “how to” section that discusses the nuts and bolts of writing feminist cultural criticism.
Dolan was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. She received the 2013 Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Scholarship in the Field of Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research. In 2011, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women and Theatre Program. Dolan was inaugurated into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 2009.
Dolan received the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She was elected to the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers in fall 2006, after receiving a College of Fine Arts teaching award earlier in her UT career. During her six years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from 1988-1994, she received the William Kiekhofer Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Dolan’s books include Wendy Wasserstein (2017), a critical engagement with the late playwrights’ significant work; Theatre & Sexuality (2010); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005); Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001); Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1993); and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991), which was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition with a new introduction in 2012.
Dolan edited A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw (2011), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Drama. She is the co-editor with Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana of Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café (2015), which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in the Best Anthology category. She is also the author of over 80 essays and articles in books and journals.
Dolan is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a past president of the Women and Theatre Program, also of ATHE. She is the former Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she taught in and chaired the PhD Program in Theatre from 1994-1999.
At Princeton, Dolan received the 2025 Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, which “recognizes extraordinary faculty distinction in humanities and publication; in teaching and advising; and in humanities-related University service.”