Tim Raphael, is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies who has taught courses in Theater, Performance Studies, and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, Ursinus College, Rutgers University, and the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, Portugal. Prior to earning a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University he spent a decade in the professional theater as the assistant to artistic director Robert Falls at Wisdom Bridge Theater in Chicago, associate producer at Theatre For A New Audience, associate artistic director at East Coast Arts, artistic associate at The New York Theater Workshop, and the co-founder and artistic director of the Mumbo Jumbo Theater Company, a multicultural ensemble devoted to staging plays from the Western canon in a global context. Assistant directing credits include Falls’ Hamlet with Aidan Quinn, Julie Taymor’s Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest, the Junebug plays with John O’Neal, andJack Gelber’s Big Shot with Mandy Patinkin. He has directed at venues that include The Kennedy Center, New York Stage and Film, New York Theater Workshop, Soho Rep and Ensemble Studio Theater. Recent theater projects include Something to Declare and Time Without Number, both based on the experience of recent immigrants to the United States and developed from oral histories and ethnographies conducted by his students at Rutgers-Newark, and Robeson in Space, a Cold War fantasia co-written with composer/performer Guillermo E. Brown.As a theater director, producer, adapter and playwright he is responsible for the development of over forty new American plays.

He has recently completed a book entitled Ronald Reagan: The President Electric, exploring the myriad ways contemporary politics is defined by the performance-based media in which Reagan trained. The book documents Reagan’s apprenticeship in radio, film, television, advertising and public relations as a means of analyzing how these new modes of cultural production have transformed the way we imagine and engage the political. Articles excerpted from the book have appeared in The Drama Review and Theatre Journal. Other recent articles include an essay for a special issue of Transformations on “teaching through testimony” thatdocuments the creation of Something to Declare; an experiment in performative writing published in Oxford Magazine that chronicles the process of adapting Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip; and an argument for the theoretical and methodological virtues of a performance oriented pedagogy—based on a class he taught at Dartmouth that resulted in the creation of  Heartland, a rock-opera about the militia movement—that appeared in Theater Topics.