Ralph Alan Cohen is the Executive Director, Education Director, and co-founder of the American Shakespeare Center, and Professor of English at Mary Baldwin College. As project director of " Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, The Stage, and The Classroom," he will shape the schedule and overall curriculum; be in daily communication with the participants and visiting scholars; help to lead workshops with actors and participants; deal with any unexpected difficulties that might arise; and make a final report on the Institute. Professor Cohen has twice guest edited special teaching issues of The Shakespeare Quarterly, and has published articles on teaching Shakespeare, on Shakespeare, Jonson, and early modem English staging. He has directed professional productions of fifteen of Shakespeare's plays as well as plays by Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont, and Middleton. A frequent reader at the Folger Shakespeare Library, he was a participant in the Folger's 1987 NEH seminar on Shakespeare in Performance, led by Michael Goldman. In 1993 Professor Cohen led a two-day workshop called "From Critic to Director" for the Folger's NEH- sponsored "Shakespeare and the Language of Performance." In 1995 he directed the Center for Renaissance and Shakespearean Staging, an NEH-sponsored Institute for university teachers of Shakespeare and theatre. Every year since 1992, he has either directed summer workshops on teaching Shakespeare or been a visiting scholar for programs run by Southern Oregon University, Shakespeare and Company, or the Folger Shakespeare Library. He also leads a graduate course on Teaching Shakespeare in the Master of Letters and Fine Arts program he designed for Mary Baldwin College. In the summers of 2002 and 2004 he was the director of the American Shakespeare Center's NEH-sponsored Institutes. In 1987 he was one of the first recipients of Virginia's Outstanding Faculty Award, and he has twice been had honorary degrees conferred on him for his work in the staging and teaching of Shakespeare (Georgetown University 1997 and St. Lawrence University 2003). He was project captain for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse, opened in 2001.
Sarah Enloe, and Mary Baldwin College Graduate Students in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in Performance will be responsible for coordinating the overall Institute and its daily operation.
Jay McClure, Associate Artistic Director, will stage manage the rehearsals and oversee the actors’ schedules.
Alan Armstrong is Professor of Humanities at Southern Oregon University where he directs the Center of Shakespeare Studies. His close association with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland makes him especially adept at discussing the competing claims of innovation and tradition in presenting the plays.
Stephen Booth is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His book on Macbeth and King Lear and his work on the sonnets are the standards in the field. His most recent book is Precious Nonsense, a book that looks in part at Twelfth Night, which he co-directed for the American Shakespeare Center.
Alan Dessen is emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and former Managing Director of ACTER. In 1995-96, he co-directed the NEH-sponsored "Shakespeare Examined through Performance." He is the author of Jonson's Moral Comedy and three influential books on the original staging of Shakespeare’s plays. He co-authored A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580-1642.
Roslyn Lander Knutson is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the recipient of that university's Excellence in Teaching award. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Repertory, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare's Time, and has recently directed The Tempest.
Jeremy Lopez is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama and the forthcoming study Renaissance Dramatic Forms and is the theatre-review editor of Shakespeare Bulletin.
Paul Menzer is Director of The Mary Baldwin College Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in Performance Program and co-architect of the American Shakespeare Center's 1995 NEH Institute "The Center for Renaissance and Shakespearean Staging." His publications include the edited collection, Shakespeare Inside and Out: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage and articles on text, acting, and theatre history in publications such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, and Shakespeare Bulletin.
Tiffany Stern is a Fellow and Lecturer in English Literature, Oxford University, and Tutor in English
Literature, University College, Oxford. Dr Stern specializes in Shakespeare, theatre history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, book history and editing. Her monographs are Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, and Making Shakespeare; with Simon Palfrey she is co-authoring Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
1
c.f. the work of CRASS alumni Graham Paul, Michael Shurgot (his book Stages of Play: Shakespeare’s Theatrical Energies in Elizabethan Performance), Margaret Maurer (Colgate University), and Vincent Murphy (Emory)
2
See for example, Milla Riggio’s book, Teaching Shakespeare through Performance (MLA 1999, a collection of essays on pedagogy that is performance-based, or my own book, ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare (Prestwick House 2008), which urges classroom staging.
visualizing while they consider practical staging options. Seeing such possibilities and developing that kind of vision is next to impossible in the abstract; it requires the experience of working with actors, of seeing action in time and space, and of learning what choices are “playable” and how they would play.