The Glasscock Center is excited to continue its series, which highlights humanities research at Texas A&M, and the vital role it plays at the university and in the world beyond the academy.

For this highlight, we invited Alexandra E. LaGrand to tell us about her experience serving as the Graduate Student Representative on the Glasscock Center Advisory Board (2023-2024) and as a Graduate Research Fellow (2024-2025) at the Glasscock Center. 

Alexandra E. LaGrand is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Texas A&M University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Britain in Breeches: Gender and British Identity in the Romantic Theatre,” explores how women’s performances as male characters in drama between 1770 and 1840 relate to British culture and identity. Specifically, she seeks to understand how women performed British masculinity on stage and what that meant. LaGrand is currently working on a book chapter called “‘Mr. Macready in little’: Charlotte Cushman, William Charles Macready, and Shakespearean Mentorship” that will be included in an edited volume titled An Alternative History of Shakespearean Acting: Contexts, Practices and Cultural Authority (forthcoming). “I'm a feminist theater historian and so I love looking at women's contributions to theater history and how they shaped the theatrical record...I'm really interested in the sort of alternative stories,” she says. 

LaGrand was one of two Graduate Student Representatives on the Glasscock Center Advisory Board for 2023-2024. Graduate Student Representatives offer guidance from a graduate student perspective, particularly on how the Center can best serve the graduate student body’s research endeavors in the humanities.

“Being in a service role was very exciting for me; so when the opportunity came, I really jumped on it,” she says. “I'm just so grateful to the Glasscock Center for giving me the opportunity to serve on the board.”

LaGrand notes that she enjoyed reviewing funding applications as a Graduate Student Representative, because it gave her a sense of what the scholarly community was doing at Texas A&M but also provided professional development.

“[Reviewing applications] was doubly helpful for me; not only to see what was happening on campus but also to get a sense of what makes a successful grant application,” she says. “As a graduate student, being able to learn those skills is just imperative for our own funding…it was a wonderful professional development experience.”

For the 2024-5 academic year, LaGrand received a highly-competitive Glasscock Graduate Research Fellowship, which provides support to graduate students working on the master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation, including funding for fieldwork, travel to archives, and purchase of research materials. Last July, LaGrand spent a week at Harvard University’s Harvard Theatre Collection to examine archival materials such as prompt books, actress diaries, and playbills which will make up the bulk of her dissertation. During her visit, she took over 900 photos of various materials for her dissertation research.

“I could not do my work, let alone my dissertation, without funding like this because not only are things just not digitized like people assume, but it's wildly different to be able to go into the archive,” she says. “It's imperative to be able to spend time with the material, that's why the funding is just so wickedly important.”

LaGrand’s research crosses disciplinary boundaries, combining traditions from English, textual studies, women’s and gender studies, and theater history. Her dissertation argues that a reciprocal relationship exists between genderfluidity and masculinity, as one often facilitated the other and vice versa. 

“I'm very much, as I like to say, excavating women's theater history, raising it to the surface, and really emphasizing it,” she says. “I really hope to contribute to the larger public’s understanding by emphasizing women's theater histories and celebrating their contributions …because they really help shape the theatrical record and that's important and we should talk about it.”

Additionally, LaGrand is the project founder and principal investigator of Points Like A Man: The Shakespearean Breeches Performance Catalogue, 1660-1900. Points Like a Man is a open-access database cataloging nearly 7,000 individual Shakespearean performances by women portraying male characters from 1660 to 1900.

“I'm a big advocate of accessibility of information and resources, this database is one way that I can share this information,” LaGrand says. “I'm hoping people learn that women shaped a lot of theater history, in particular, that these genderfluid roles shaped theater history. I'm hoping to open up avenues for research into other stories.”

With the remaining funds of her Graduate Research Fellowship, LaGrand is planning a smaller second research trip later this year to an archive to find additional materials for her project. 

“I'm indebted to the Glasscock Center for the funding they gave me…I couldn't have done the research without it and so I'm just so, so grateful,” LaGrand says. “It really made my dissertation research happen.”

LaGrand was also recently invited to participate in a dissertation seminar called "Researching and Writing the Early Modern Dissertation" hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Folger Institute. Over the course of this year, LaGrand will share her research in six different sessions, four of which will be in-person at the library in Washington, D.C. “This seminar was quite special as I will be working with several other Ph.D candidates in multiple fields from multiple universities throughout the year,” she says.

LaGrand plans to eventually convert her dissertation into a monograph in order to share and elevate the many contributions of women performers to theater history.