Hugh M. Richmond, “Renaissance Landscapes,” Mouton, 1973; De Gruyter 2019.

This study explores some of the significant points in the evolution of a literary pattern, a recognizable topic or motif which captures attention through the poet’s mastery of language, which records the nuances of human awareness of each period. The author coins this…[Read more]

Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supraling…[Read more]

Review of The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Oresteia (2019), Adapted by Ellen McLaughlin, Directed by Michael Kahn, Music by Kamala Sankaram, interview with Sankaram

This essay explores the covert censorship of Shakespeare production nudity by Western and Eastern theater and television companies. Using Ian McKellen’s 2007 RSC King Lear as its case study, the essay considers the economic and political pressures brought to bear on the RSC by those seeking to prevent the perceived corruption of young people, and…[Read more]

This essay recovers, describes, and analyzes the theatrical tradition emerging from New Orleans’s free people of color during the antebellum period. I will start out by tracing the presence of free people of color in the francophone theatres of New Orleans, teasing out their impact on the early formations of a francophone theatrical culture in the…[Read more]

On January 1, 1824, the English-speaking population of New Orleans celebrated the grand opening of the American Theatre, lauding
the advent of “Bards our own” and the rise of “our Drama” in the Crescent City (qtd. in Smither 41). For the city’s francophone residents, this event marked a new stage in the ongoing battle for cultural survival.…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]

Pages from a local East Chicago, IN, publication commemorating the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at South Chicago’s Republic Steel. Lupe Gallardo Marshall (Mexican immigrant social worker at Hull House) gave this testimony to the La Follette Committee of Congress investigating the events of that day, May 30, 1937.

I am thinking about writing a…[Read more]

How will immersive virtual reality (VR) cognitively affect the audiences who interface with it to interpret Shakespeare performances? Current theories of performance and cognition are based on theatre and film audiences, but VR performances combine features of both media: a disembodied spectral presence, like a theatrical audience; and a flexible…[Read more]

This is a syllabus for Renata Kobetts Miller’s capstone research course on Melodrama at the City College of New York in Spring 2019. It is built on the Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, edited by Carolyn Williams (2018). The syllabus includes the final assignment sequence for scaffolded research.

This essay argues that feminists can productively use theories of intermediality to consider postmodern representations of Shakespeare’s Ophelia fabricated by women (or by creators self-identified as female, in the case of online avatars), in order to explore the following questions: under what circumstances might we imagine femininity as…[Read more]

This chapter examines narratives that reflect the impact of epistemologies of otherness upon our understanding of race. Race intersects with other social factors such as class, cultural citizenship, and gender. This chapter draws on case studies of artists in exile or diaspora who interrogate their own identities, because exile brings racial…[Read more]

This article analyzes Stop-and-Frisk policing within the long history of lynching through the analytical framework of performance studies. Contemporary audio recordings of stop-and-frisk procedures are thought in relation to the historical examples of the Zoot Suit Riots and late 19th-century and early 20th-century lynchings of African Americans.

Two-Act Play

Nobody goes to Gary is a Swiftian satire. Gil Tolliver, an investigative reporter I New York City, makes a fateful journey into the real heart of Gary, Indiana, after hearing the musical tune “Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana” during _The Music Man_. Don’t measure the distance of Gary from New York in miles, but in emotional light…[Read more]

Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]