Westley Montgomery

Westley Montgomery joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, Montgomery earned a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies from Stanford University, with minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Montgomery also holds both undergraduate and master’s degrees in Music from the University of Michigan.

Montgomery’s research lies at the intersection of trans studies, Black cultural studies, performance studies, and sound and technology studies. Examining how voices, media technologies, and performance practices shape social understandings of race, gender, embodiment, and power, Montgomery’s current book project, Technologies of Possession: Race, Gender, and the Trans Voice in Performance, investigates how technologies of the voice both reinforce and challenge dominant structures of power.

Montgomery’s work has been awarded the Charles R. Lyons Memorial Prize for Outstanding Dissertation (Stanford University) and the American Society for Theatre Research’s Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize. Additional writing has appeared in Theatre Journal and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Other scholarly interests include social media and streaming performance, Japanophilia in African American culture, and opera pedagogies and the construction of somatic difference.  

Montgomery teaches courses on gender and performance, feminist and queer theory, Black gender studies, technology and voice, and trans cultural production, and is also a vocalist and multidisciplinary artist, with a background in opera and experimental and devised performance.