2025 Ballot

Bio:

Penelope Geng (she/her) is associate professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, located on the traditional homeland of the Dakota and Ojibwe people. She is a scholar who works at the intersection of critical legal studies, disability studies, and performance. The author of Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (2021), her articles on Shakespeare, law, historical formalism, and disability have been published in journals such as Studies in Philology, The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Ben Jonson Journal, and The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare. Currently, she’s writing a second monograph, “Disabled by Law,” co-editing a special issue on “Disability and Racial Capitalism” with Andrew Bozio, and editing Richard II for Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. Her leadership experience includes serving on the editorial board of Early Theatre, on the MLA LLC 16th English Forum Executive Committee, and the MLA’s First Book Prize Committee. With Jennifer E. Row, she is the co-founder and co-organizer of Uncommon Bodies, a Twin Cities-based research workshop devoted to sharing knowledge on disability theory, aesthetics, and pedagogy. For the SAA, Professor Geng served on the 2022 Program Committee, the 2023 Nominations Committee, and co-chaired (with Mary Trull) the 2022-23 Minneapolis Local Arrangements Committee. She co-led seminars in 2017 and 2024, co-organized panels in 2023 and 2025, and presented on a panel in 2023.

Statement:

My research on literature, law, and disability emerges from personal experiences of travel, immigration, and assimilation. I was born in China, and spent my formative years in Toronto, Canada, before moving to the US for graduate studies. As a foreign student, I navigated the typical bureaucratic challenges that noncitizens face when it comes to accessing routine services. Through those experiences and my research on early modern citizenship, ablenationalism, and legal disability, I have come to understand the term “access” not primarily through the lens of law, technology, or design, but through the theater’s language of intimacy, negotiation, conflict, collaboration, and community. I am fascinated by how different social groups claim authority (including professional expertise) through the affective language of community, belonging, and “good” citizenship. As a trustee, I would draw on my background and research to advance the SAA’s mission of serving the different needs of its members, particularly when it comes to accessibility. My experience of the SAA suggests that despite admirable progress in recent years, there’s work to be done around accessibility and accommodations. As a trustee, I would work hard to ensure that the conference can be a welcoming space that respects individuals’ different needs, and to strengthen ongoing SAA initiatives that document and promote the field-changing work of artists, scholars, and teachers working outside and at the edges of the university.

Bio:

Laura Kolb is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, where she also serves as Director of Great Works, a core program in world literature. She is the author of Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (2021) and co-editor of Early Modern Debts, 1550–1700 (2020). She is also co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of ELR on the topic of comic epistemologies (2025), which grew out of a recent SAA seminar. Her articles have appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Renaissance Drama, SEL, and other journals. She has contributed book chapters to several edited collections, including Disgust in Early Modern English Literature (2016) and a forthcoming collection on Measure for Measure for the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides series. She has written for a broader public in essays and reviews in Electric Literature and the TLS. She serves on the board of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar and is a contributing editor to the Shakespeare Newsletter, for which she regularly writes theater reviews. At Baruch, she has co-led faculty seminars on inclusive pedagogy and hybrid teaching; she received the Barbara Reich Gluck Teaching Award in 2020. For the SAA, she has co-led seminars in 2017, 2020, and 2023 and organized a panel in 2024.

Statement:

Since my first SAA as a graduate student in 2012, the organization has been central to my life as a scholar and teacher. Each year since then, the conference has allowed me to share and encounter new work, forge connections with researchers and theater practitioners from across the world, and replenish my sense of early modern studies’ vitality and relevance.

As a seminar participant and leader, it has been a joy to see publications emerge from conference discussions: to read colleagues’ papers revised into articles; to aid the process of expanding seminars into edited collections; and (very recently) to anticipate first books by scholars whose own first SAA seminars I co-facilitated. Published scholarship makes the conversations that unfold in our conference rooms widely available—widely, but never fully. The seminars that make up the SAA’s heart are after all dialogic, fluid, live. That liveness—that collaborative spark—is to me their most singular and important quality, and one that I hope as a trustee to help nurture. To that end, it is important to me that the SAA continue to foster inclusivity of all kinds, offering access and support to graduate students, contingent scholars, and those with high teaching loads and limited research funds. It is equally important that the organization include voices from emerging as well as established subfields, and create space for dialogue across the wonderfully varied terrain of early modern studies.

SAA has an important role in developing teaching as well as scholarship. I work at Baruch College, an urban public institution whose population reflects the diversity of New York’s five boroughs. At Baruch, I have seen first-hand the power of texts from our period to engage students from a kaleidoscopic range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This coming SAA features a special seminar for undergraduate students and several workshops dedicated to pedagogy alongside performance, instructional modality, and course and assignment design. As trustee, I hope to help grow this kind of pedagogy-related programming, and to (further) break down perceived barriers between research and teaching. The SAA conference can feel like a break: a kind of green world, set apart from our ordinary lives at our home institutions. I want to ensure that it also nourishes those lives. When we return from the meeting each year, it is my hope that we can bring its energy, ideas, and intellectual excitement back with us into our classrooms.

Bio:

Joe Ortiz is the Dorrance D. Roderick Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he teaches Renaissance and comparative literature. He is the author of Broken Harmony: Shakespeare and the Politics of Music (2011) and the editor of Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism (2016) and On the Origin and Progress of the Art of Music by John Taverner (2018). Most recently he edited Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (2024) for MLA’s Teaching World Literature Series. Although an early modernist, he has also written about modern gay fiction in Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel (2022) and articles in The Gay & Lesbian Review. In 2016–17 he was an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library. At UTEP he is department chair and a faculty advisor in the Liberal Arts Honors Program. He served on the Ad Hoc Prize Committee in 2019 and led a seminar in 2022.

Statement:

SAA has profoundly influenced my development as a scholar. It was my first SAA seminar, in San Diego in 2007, that gave me the intellectual spark I needed to turn my dissertation into a book. I was fortunate then to be part of a group that included both literature specialists and musicologists, ranging from graduate students to established scholars, who were passionate about my topic and who responded to my ideas with encouragement rather than skepticism.

The supportive intellectual community I found at SAA is the biggest reason I keep going back, and over the years I have talked to a great many people who feel the same way. For many scholars, SAA is the one conference they attend in a year, because they know their work will be taken seriously there—and will be read. Some of us may be the only early modernist in our department, or we may be overwhelmed with teaching or administrative duties at our home institutions. In these cases the SAA provides a vital opportunity to invigorate our research and inspire our teaching. It gives us a space to express our concerns and be heard.

My sense of SAA’s uniqueness would drive my work as a trustee. I strongly believe that SAA should continue to do what it can to make its conferences more accessible to all scholars, including graduate students, contingent faculty, scholars who work in conservative towns or institutions, and scholars of color. These scholars stand to benefit the most from attending SAA, and yet they often receive little institutional support to do so. As a trustee I would advocate for making the conferences more affordable, in locations that are easier to reach and have more options for accommodation. I would also do what I can to bolster the SAA’s travel grant system.

Among professional organizations of its kind, SAA has been a leader in expanding and diversifying its membership. It must continue to be so. The state of humanities education in the U.S. will likely be challenging over the next few years, and it will rely on teachers and scholars who see their work as part of a larger, shared mission.

Bio:

Kathryn Vomero Santos is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of Shakespeare in Tongues (forthcoming 2025) and the co-editor of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, The Ethical Implications of Shakespeare in Performance and Appropriation (2023), and Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk and Other Renaissance Fable Translations (2017). Santos served as co-director of the Humanities Collective at Trinity from 2020–2024 and is a co-founder of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (BSC), a multidisciplinary and multigenerational group of scholars, educators, artists, and activists who engage with Shakespeare in ways that reflect the lived realities of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. With the BSC, she has received major grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the 2024 Shakespeare Publics Award from the SAA. She served as Performance Reviews Editor for Shakespeare Bulletin from 2020–2023, the inaugural Early Modern Section Editor for The Sundial, an Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series Fellow, and a member of the executive committee for the MLA Translation Studies Forum. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Bulletin and ACMRS Press and on the boards of directors for Humanities Texas and the Friends of International Friendship Park. For the SAA, Santos led the Digital Strategies Committee in 2021 and served on the Program Committee for the 2022 meeting. She co-led seminars in 2019 and 2021, co-convened a workshop in 2023, and co-organized panels in 2016 and 2024.

Statement:

A common refrain I have heard among fellow members over the years is that the SAA is our intellectual home: it is a place where we try out new work, find interlocutors who challenge and excite us, share pedagogical ideas, compare notes about institutional practices, and strengthen the relationships that nourish and sustain us. Like any home, the SAA requires careful maintenance,

but it also requires flexibility to meet the shifting needs of those whom we welcome in and to adapt to the changing circumstances of the world in which we live. In the face of increasing professional precarity, decreasing funds for the arts and humanities, attacks on academic and personal freedom, and attempts to exert epistemic control in classrooms at all levels, we need to bolster organizations like the SAA more than ever. I believe that if we continue to invest in efforts to create an inclusive and accessible annual meeting, work to expand and diversify our membership with intention and care, and develop a strong foundation for the financial wellbeing of the organization, the SAA will be poised provide the types of support and shelter that we all need to thrive in this uncertain time.

If elected trustee, I would bring with me the knowledge I have gained from serving on the SAA Program and Digital Strategies Committees as well as the skills I have developed as a leader and board member of dynamic arts and humanities organizations that are devoted to transdisciplinary scholarly exchange, mentorship, professional development, and community-based programming. I would use my insights from working with middle and high school teachers through Humanities Texas as well as with a wide range of theater practitioners to create initiatives that expand our membership and help us reach broader communities engaged in the study and practice of Shakespeare.

What I appreciate most about the SAA is that it is largely driven by the interests of the membership. Seminar and workshop offerings reflect emergent scholarly trends, and even newer fields have grown out of conversations that begin at the conference. The organization is likewise responsive to member-led initiatives that foster publications, celebrate accomplishments, build coalitions, and create networking and mentorship opportunities. In addition to holding space for such grassroots organizing, I will learn from the successes of these initiatives as models for how to develop forward-looking programming that anticipates the needs of members so that the burden to organize does not fall to the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. As trustee, I will also advocate for maintaining open channels of communication by holding regular listening sessions and creating year-round opportunities for feedback with the hope that the annual meeting can be part of an ongoing conversation about how the SAA can be the intellectual home for as many people as possible.