Zora Duncan’s research explores the entanglement of race, gender, and sexuality in American drama, performance, and literature from the 19th century to the present. Working at the intersection of black studies; performance studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; disability studies; and queer of color critique, Zora Duncan takes a para-performative approach to academic study, seeking to initiate a rehearsal of critical possibility by carefully working through the cognitive, affective, and performative dimensions of study across disciplinary boundaries. Her manuscript-in-progress, The Love of Things to Come: Rehearsing Blackness in the Theatre of (Non) Being, is concerned with women writers of color who engage with blackness and the racialized history of spectatorship in order to interrogate the structural limits of performance and representation, as well as initiate an ethical shift in the social and cultural positioning of performance and creative practice. Zora is also at work on a second book project exploring the relationship between spatiality, gender, and myth in Twentieth and Twenty First Century African American drama, poetry, performance, and self-writing. Tracing a particular literary thread running from the Harlem Rennaissance, through the post-war period, and into the poetry and performace of black trans artists working in the digital age, Zora seeks to articulate how gender is constructed spatially in the work of black cultural producers in ways that locate, mobilize, and reroute a mythmaking function that serves to ground normative aesthetic and representational practice, effecting a transformation of our relationship to racialized and gendered embodiment and performance.