Dr. E. Patrick Johnson spent his early childhood as the youngest of seven children with their single mother in a one-bedroom apartment in Hickory, N.C. When he received his Ph.D. in speech communication in 1996 from Louisiana State University, the town held a celebration and declared July 20 “Dr. E. Patrick Johnson Day” because he was the first African-American from Hickory to receive a Ph.D.
Today, as chair of the African American studies department and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University, Johnson is a scholar without borders. His research crosses academic disciplines and creative art forms in multiple ways, to the extent that he describes himself only half-jokingly as “an academic trickster.”
As a researcher and artist, Johnson, now 51, performs nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and performance.
“I am very interdisciplinary in my research,” Johnson says. “I believe in multimodal forms of scholarship that reaches the very people that I am studying. I want the work that I do to be comprehensible to the people I am studying and not just an academic audience.”
For example, he turned his ground-breaking 2008 book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History into a theatrical production. “I adapt my research for the stage . . . so in my solo performance I take on voices of as many as 13 men that I interviewed,” he explains. He conducted interviews with a total of 79 men for the book.
His staged reading, “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales” has toured to more than 100 college campuses since 2006. In 2009, he expanded the performance into a full-length stage play, Sweet Tea—The Play, which has been performed in several U.S. cities, and for which he won a Black Theatre Alliance Award for best solo performance. A Washington Post review said Johnson “has a poised delivery and can plunge himself into moments of lively theatricality.”
Oral history has been integral to Johnson’s research dating back to his dissertation, based on his grandmother’s narrative of her experiences as a domestic worker in the segregated South.
