Matthew Daube has a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, an MFA in Playwriting from Smith College, and a PhD in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University. His dissertation research was on race and ethnicity in stand-up comedy, with a focus on comedians Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. Matthew's article “The Case of Rabbi Cantor vs. Roscoe W. Chandler: The Marx Brothers’ Ethnic Construction of Character” was published in the anthology A Century of the Marx Brothers (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). His article “The Stand-up as Stand-in: Performer-Audience Intimacy and the Emergence of the Stand-up Comic in the United States since the 1950s” is scheduled to be published in the anthology Live Comedy and Its Audience (West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press).
While at Stanford, Matthew directed Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud and his own adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. He has taught for various departments and programs at Stanford and in 2008-9 was a teaching fellow for the Center for Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity.