Sarah Balkin is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research spans the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with particular strengths in nineteenth and twentieth-century theater and literature, genre, melodrama, and comedy. Her monograph, Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2019. Her current research project is on the historical emergence of deadpan performance styles (1830-1930) and their derivations in contemporary queer and feminist comedy.