Dr. Canning received her doctorate from the University of Washington. She is the author of Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience (Routledge, 1996) and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa, 2005) which won the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. This award is given each year to the best book in ?theatre history or cognate disciplines;? Dr. Canning was the first member of the UT faculty to receive this prestigious award.

Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Tom Postlewait, was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2010. She has published in many journals, including Theatre Research International, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Theatre Annual, Theatre, and LIT: Literature, Interpretation Theory. Her work has also been included in such anthologies as Staging International Feminisms, Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and their Legacies, Women Writing Plays: Three Decades of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Land/Scape/ Theatre, Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, Women, Theatre, and Performance: The New Historiographies, Twentieth Century American Drama, and Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Embodied Space and Subjectivity. She teaches theatre and performance history and historiography, as well as feminist performance theory. Additionally, Dr. Canning has served as the Book Review Editor for Theatre Journal, President of the Women and Theatre Program, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Fine Arts.

She is a past President of the American Society for Theatre Research. Currently she serves as the Associate Editor for Theatre Research International, the journal of the International Federation for Theatre Research, she will assume the editorship in 2013