Gay Gibson Cima is a Professor of English and the former Director of the Human Rights Initiative at Georgetown University. Her book _Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race_ (Cambridge University Press 2006) illuminates African, African American, European, and European American women’s strategies for entering early debates on human rights. The American Society for Theatre Research granted this volume the 2007 Barnard Hewitt Prize for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.

Cima has published widely on eighteenth and nineteenth-century feminist theatre history and practice as well as contemporary performance theory and criticism. Her work appears in major theatre journals as well as in anthologies such as The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies (Sage 2006) and Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 1999). Her book _Performing Women_ was published by Cornell University Press in 1993. Cima earned her Ph.D. from Cornell University, her M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. from the University of Nebraska.