Naomi J. Stubbs is Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Stubbs’s areas of research include nineteenth-century American theatre and popular entertainments, and critical editing. Her first book, Cultivating National Identity Through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment, was published in 2013 with Palgrave Macmillan. In this study, Stubbs examines the once-popular outdoor entertainment venues known today as “pleasure gardens” as sites for the experimentation with and performance of American identities. Together with Dr. Amy E. Hughes (Brooklyn College), she recently completed an annotated critical edition of the diary of nineteenth century actor/manager/playwright, Harry Watkins. The book (A Player and a Gentleman) is accompanied by a free digital edition of the complete text (Scott D. Dexter, Technology Director). Stubbs is co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and has published articles and chapters in The Pleasure Garden, From Vauxhall to Coney Island; Theatre, Performance, and Analogue Technology; and the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She holds a PhD in Theatre from The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an MRes in Editing Lives and Letters from Queen Mary, University of London.
American Pleasure Gardens 
Because I have occasionally written about outdoor spectacles, chiefly Pain’s pyrodramas and the Kiralfy brothers’ THE FALL OF BABYLON, I’ve noted baseball parks in Cincinnati and Coney Island as the principal locus for these shows. I’ve also noted fictionalized pleasure parks of the ancient world (as in BEN-HUR). What I’ve clearly failed to do is to describe and effectively analyze them as you will have done or to note the ambience they afforded. I look forward to your book.