Participants

Keynote

Dr. Erika T. Lin  /  George Mason University

Erika trained at the University of Pennsylvania and now teaches in the English department at George Mason University. Specializing in early modern literature and culture, with a focus on theatre and performance, she also has interests in medieval drama, gender studies, folklore, and Asian American studies. Her first book, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, won the 2013 David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies. Combining literary criticism, theatre history, cultural studies, and performance theory, this book theorizes early modern performance as a material medium, and it reveals how that medium not only transmitted cultural attitudes and practices but also actively produced and reshaped them. Erika is currently working on a new book exploring the performance dynamics of seasonal festivities and the commercialization of early modern theatre. During the 2014-15 year, she has been continuing this project as an Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library.


Respondents

Dr. Robert W. Barrett, Jr.  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rob is an associate professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in global medieval literatures, ecocriticism, textual editing, and fantasy fiction. His research interests include early English drama, region and locality; his 2009 book, Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 from University of Notre Dame press argues for the localization of British literary history, especially in the intersection of topography, language, and politics. His current project is a critical edition of the Chester Whitsun Plays for the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series.

Dr. Curtis Perry  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Curtis is a professor of English and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, Milton, early modern English literature and culture, with an emphasis upon literature’s participation in political debate. His research interests include classical reception, historicist criticism, and Jacobean drama. He has edited three volumes and published two books, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice in 1997 and Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England in 2006, both from Cambridge University Press. His current book project unites his interests in classical reception and early modern drama. He also served as head of the English department from 2009 to 2013, and then as an interim dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2013 to 2014.

Dr. Andrea R. Stevens  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Andrea is an associate professor of English, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Renaissance and Restoration theatre, British literature surveys, Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Her research interests include theatre history from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century and performance studies, especially theories related to original practices and the performing body. Her 2013 book, Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400-1642 from Edinburgh University Press, recovers the crucial grammar of theatrical cosmetics and their reception as important and overlooked aspects of the onstage embodiment of characters. She is now working on two book projects, one on metadramatic devices in Caroline drama and the other on commonplace citations as a source of theatrical consciousness. Andrea also directed John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi this spring for the Armory Free Theatre.


Presenters

Lee Emrich  /  University of California, Davis

Lee is a second-year PhD student in English at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests focus on gender, embodiment, and material culture in early modern literature.

InHye Ha / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

InHye is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she specializes in the Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. Currently, she is writing a dissertation titled “‘The Face of Things’: Global Commerce and the Embodiment of Eighteenth-Century British Subjectivity.” Her research interests include the new materialisms, posthumanism, and the intersection of literature and science. She recently published an article on Margaret Cavendish’s engagement with utopian literature in The Blazing World (1666). She was an IPRH graduate student fellow in 2013-14.

Ann Hubert  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ann is a doctoral student in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “Performing Piety: Preachers and Players in East Anglia, 1400-1520” in January 2015. Ann is the author of “Preaching Rhetorical Invention: Poeta and Paul in the Digby Conversion of St. Paul,” an article forthcoming with Early Theatre. She also has directed five medieval plays, and is the director of “The N-Town Plays” performed in connection with this conference.

Caitlin McHugh  /  University of Minnesota

Caitlin is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Minnesota where she specializes in Shakespeare, Restoration Shakespeare, and adaptation. Her work has appeared in Restoration and is forthcoming in an edited collection called Shakespeare / Not Shakespeare. She was also a fellow with the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance in 2014.

Mark B. Owen  /  Loyola University Chicago

Mark is a PhD candidate in English at Loyola University Chicago. He is currently working on his dissertation, which examines the relationship between dramatic representation, theatrical space, and audience perception in the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s plays. The project puts forth a theory of theatrical spatial construction—deep theatrical space—that includes the unseen, invisible, diegetic, and discursive without dismissing these aspects of drama as exclusively textual or non-dramatic.

Carla B. Rosell  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Carla is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Do Feet have Mouths?: Imaginings of Slander in Early Modern England.” Her project aims to disentangle how slander, especially when directed at high-ranking individuals, was imagined in the laws and literature of the age and how these overlapping and often contradictory attempts at definition considered the troubling agency of common subjects.

Cristina Rosell  /  Louisiana State University

Cristina is a third-year PhD candidate in English at Louisiana State University, where she is also minoring in Women’s and Gender Studies. Cristina obtained her Master’s degree from New York University. Her interests include Renaissance drama and masques; court culture and identity politics; and queer theory.

Elizabeth E. Tavares  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches early modern English literature with an emphasis on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. Her research interests include the popular playing companies, cultures of audience and reception, Shakespeare in performance studies, and theatre history. Her dissertation, “Acts of Imagination: Curating the Elizabethan Repertory, 1582-1594,” sketches the house styles of the major playing companies and their methods of distinction in the Renaissance theatrical marketplace. She has published several performance reviews with Shakespeare Bulletin and consults for the Back Room Shakespeare Project in Chicago. She was a fellow with the Academy for Advanced Study in the Renaissance in 2014, and will be participating in the Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard this summer.

Sara B. T.  Thiel  /  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sara is a PhD candidate in Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where her research focuses on early modern drama and performance. Her dissertation, “Great Expectations: Stuart Performances of Pregnancy as Public Discourse, 1603-1642,” examines early seventeenth-century performances of pregnancy on public and private English stages. At the University of Illinois Sara has served as Production Dramaturg for ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest. From 2008-2010 she served as an Associate Director for Shakespeare Dallas; shows there include: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Cymbeline, Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, Othello, and Timon of Athens. While working with Shakespeare Dallas, Sara also directed her adaptation of Venus and Adonis for their Shakespeare Unplugged series.

An IPRH Reading Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign