Gillian Rodger is assistant professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh with a dissertation entitled Male Impersonation on the North American Variety and Vaudeville Stage, 1868–1930. Her current research focuses on American musical theater genres of the nineteenth century and she is working on a monograph on variety, the form that preceded vaudeville, from its emergence in the pre-Civil War period to the emergence of vaudeville in the 1890s.