Kelsey Jacobson

Kelsey Jacobson is an Assistant Professor in the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen's University and a co-founding director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research. She is passionate about teaching and supervising and was awarded the Frank Knox Award for Teaching Excellence in 2021. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies and her MA from Queen Mary, University of London where she also spent time as a Junior Researcher working in Research and Higher Education at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, UK.
 
Her research focuses on audience and spectatorship studies, and in particular on the ways in which audiences impact, receive, and make meaning through performance. She was awarded funding from SSHRC to study copresence in a project called Being Together (2021-2023) and is also currently involved in a SSHRC grant on performance and oral histories of performance called Gatherings (2019-2023). Kelsey is also completing work related to pandemic responses to the live performing arts across the G7 countries funded by the British Academy (2023-2024). She has shared her work at CATR, ASTR, ATHE, IFTR, MATC, TAPRA and in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Performance Matters, Theatre Research in Canada, Research in Drama Education, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Canadian Theatre Review. 
 
To date, Kelsey has published one co-edited collection, Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research Through Performative Research (Springer, 2020) and one monograph, Real-ish: Audiences, Feeling, and the Production of Realness in Contemporary Performance (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2023). Kelsey is also series co-editor of the Routledge Theatre & Performance Series in Audience Research with Kirsty Sedgman. Additional research interests include: affect theory, applied theatre, qualitative methodologies, and equity and access in audiences.