Ryan M Donovan

Ryan Donovan specializes in musical theater, dance, and theories of embodiment. His first book, Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines the body politics of casting Broadway musicals in the five decades beginning in 1970. Broadway Bodies won the 2024 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, was on NPR's 2023 "Books We Love" year-end list and was chosen as one of Time Out/New York's twelve best theatre books of the past three years. 

His second book, Queer Approaches in Musical Theatre, is one of the inaugural books in the new series Topics in Musical Theatre (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2023).

Ryan earned his PhD in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Ryan's articles appear in the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Studies in Musical Theatre. His editorial projects include The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre (co-edited with Laura MacDonald, 2022), and the special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre(13.1, March 2019) on dance and musical theatre (with Joanna Dee Das). Ryan is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Musical Theatre and is co-founder and vice-president of the International Society for the Study of Musicals.