Stevi Costa earned her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 2016. Her dissertation, Freaks in Public: Reading the Freakish in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, tracks the appearance of "freaks" in contemporary/late 20th century American literature and performance, and argues that "performing freakishness" is a technology of the self that enables historically marginalized bodies to (re)claim their own representation. Her work articulates theories of embodiment across narratives of bodily difference in both the literary and performing arts, and combines disciplinary approaches from literary theory, cultural studies, and performance studies. A performer herself, Costa is interested in finding the intersections of theory, practice, and the material body on the stage and on the page. Her work on disability and popular culture has been published in Studies in Gothic Fiction, the European Journal of American Culture, and In Media Res. She writes for Deconstruct Collective, an online journal for intersectional performance critique, and currently teaches Cornish College of the Arts and UW Bothell.

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