Dr. Sandra Richards

Biography

Sandra L. Richards is a Professor Emerita at Northwestern University with over twenty-five years of experience teaching in the fields of African American Studies and Theatre. Her research specialties include African American and African Diaspora theatre, as well as American drama. She authored the book "Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: Theatre Femi Osofisan" and has written numerous articles concerning black dramatists. Richards served as co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook on Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson and was part of the editorial team for the "Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance" published in 2018. From 2001 to 2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship in African American Studies, which supported her research and publication on cultural tourism and the historical context of slave sites in the Black Atlantic. In 2012, she became the founding director of the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University Qatar (NU-Q), expanding her research to include the Indian Ocean World, particularly in Qatar and Tanzania. In 2007, she received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), and she was honored with the Outstanding Scholar award from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) in 2017. Richards holds a Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University and a B.A. in English and French Literatures from Brown University.

Research Interests