Linda Charnes, Professor of English and West European Studies
Professor Charnes specializes in Shakespeare, in his early modern context, as well as in the history of Shakespearean performance, appropriation and critical reception in the arenas of mass culture, literature, film, and international politics. Her areas of expertise include theoretical approaches to performativity, psychoanalysis and the performance of everyday life, and politics, from the seventeenth through the twentyfirst centuries, as a fundamentally theatrical medium. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare and the history of fame/notoriety, and the contemporary political and cultural legacies of Shakespearean character, particularly in recent American and British politics.
Ellen MacKay, Assistant Professor of English
A specialist in early theatre, especially that of Tudor-Stuart England, Ellen MacKay’s work explores the complex impact of performance’s ephemerality on the idea and practice of history. Her first book project, on the catastrophic imperative of theatrical performance, studies the long record of disaster in the English Renaissance playhouse (fires, plagues, and sundry fatal accidents) and concludes that theatre was expected to precipitate disaster—and that the falls of Rome and of the Roman Catholic Church supplied proof to early modern Englishwomen and men of the damage it could and would do. She has a second book project underway on sea spectacles from Nero to Wagner that considers the utopian somatics of un-representable performance. She has published on Canadian theatre, on the performance of self-translation that the Immigration and Naturalization Service require, and the disciplinary legacy of Dionysus in 69. Some of her teaching interests include anti-theatricalism, early women dramatists, ‘extreme’ theatre (medieval crucifixion scenes, Grand Guignol, Roman holidays), and reception/audience studies.
Shane Vogel, Assistant Professor of English
Located at the intersection of performance studies, queer studies, and American studies, Shane Vogel’s research and teaching are broadly concerned with the ways that social relations are imagined and reimagined through American performance practices. He is currently completing a book about the relationship between cabaret performance and African American literature in the 1920s and 1930s. This book looks at how various writers and performers used the cabaret to critique the sexual and racial normativity that organized the Harlem Renaissance and Progressive-era politics of racial uplift. Professor Vogel is also interested in modern and contemporary American drama as a reflexive institution of American modernity, one that allows performers, writers, and directors to use theatrical innovation and experimentation to address and redress the social conditions of modern American life. He has published articles on nightlife and the Harlem Renaissance, the history of American cabaret, and contemporary theatre and performance. He regularly teaches courses on modern and contemporary American drama, dramatic theory, queer performance, and performance studies.
Stephen Watt, Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Theatre and Drama
Stephen Watt’s primary research interests originate in nineteenth- and twentieth-century drama and theatre, particularly as practiced in England, America, and Ireland. He has published on various aspects of these cultures, including books on the history of American drama, on Irish drama from 1880-1930, and on contemporary drama and theories of postmodernism. His recent work centers on Samuel Beckett and contemporary Irish culture, with particular emphasis on Northern Ireland. He regularly teaches courses in these areas and on contemporary Irish culture, the work of James Joyce, and on the contemporary university.
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