Colbert is the vice dean of faculty and Idol Family Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University. She is the author of The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance and the Stage and Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics. Colbert edited the 2012 Black Performance special issue of African American Review and co-edited The Psychic Hold of Slavery. She is currently working on two forthcoming book projects: a monograph titled Becoming Free: An Intellectual Biography of Lorraine Hansberry and a co-edited collection, Race and Performance After Repetition. Colbert has published articles in American Theatre, African American Review, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Scholar and Feminist Online, Theatre Topics and in the collections Black Performance Theory, Contemporary African American Women Playwrights and August Wilson: Completing the Cycle. She is the recipient of the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, Mellon Summer Research Grant and the Robert W. Woodruff Library Fellowship. Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s and Ph.D. in literatures in English from Rutgers University. She taught at Brown University, MIT and Dartmouth before returning to her alma mater in 2013.
