Charles O'Malley is a writer and dramaturg. He received his doctorate in Dramaturgy & Dramatic Criticism at Yale in December 2021, having received his MFA from that department 2018.

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He is the editor of Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance: Historiography, Narrative, and Equity in Dramatic Practice (Routledge, 2023) and the author, with Scott W. Stern, of Of Margaret: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Warrior Queen (W. W. Norton, 2025).

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He has taught at Yale College, Connecticut College, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of San Diego. 

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As a theatre maker, Charles has worked at Page 73, the Yale Repertory Theatre, the Yale Cabaret and Summer Cabaret, the Goodman Theatre, the Bay Area Playwright's Festival, Jackalope Theatre, and many other theatres. His critical writing has been published in TDR, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic, Theatre Survey, The New England Theatre Journal, QED, and on Indiewire, Lambda Literary, Daily Kos, and elsewhere.

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At Yale, he served as the Artistic Fellow at the Yale Repertory Theatre and was co-convener of the Performance Studies Working Group, an interdisciplinary group of scholars working in Performance Studies at Yale.

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Charles's dissertation, Insurgent City: Performance, Radicalism, and Queer Liberation in 1970s San Francisco, traces new aesthetic forms developed during the early years of the gay liberation movement as artistic and sexual movements sought to create utopian spaces. In 2020, he created the LGBTQ+ Archive Project, a digital assembly of resources for LGBTQ+ study.