2026 Ballot

Bio:

Jennifer Feather is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she is also cross-appointed in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research examines early modern drama’s negotiations of embodiment, violence, and political belonging, especially as these concerns intersect with classical reception and the formation of racial and gendered identities. She is author of Writing Combat and the Self in Early Modern English Literature: The Pen and the Sword (2011). She is also co-editor, with Catherine Thomas, of Violent Masculinities: Male Aggression in Early Modern Texts and Culture (2013). Her articles and chapters have appeared in Literature Compass, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Human Organization, and edited collections on contagion, adaptation, and atrocity. She is a Principal Investigator on a Mellon-funded grant, “Humanities at Work,” focused on internships for humanities majors, and a frequent advocate with the National Humanities Alliance. For the SAA she co-organized seminars in 2011, 2021, and 2025.

Statement:

Like many members, I have found a place for my fullest self and most creative scholarship at the SAA. SAA seminars have challenged me to reshape my thinking and head in new directions. The SAA has also connected me to communities of scholars who continue to support my work and sharpen my thinking. As we move forward, I hope to foster and expand these cores values: literary study, cutting-edge thinking, and inclusive community. These are challenging times for the humanities in general and for Shakespeare studies in particular. Now more than ever, Shakespeare scholarship is not only relevant but vital. As I have expanded my scholarship to broader audiences, I have found my thinking shaped in new and exciting ways. My hope for the SAA is that we foster reciprocal relationships between our close attention to Shakespearean texts, the early modern world, and the most pressing concerns of our shared cultural moment. As my work advocating for humanities funding with the National Humanities Alliance has shown me, the sorts of deep inquiry associated with Shakespeare scholarship are more important than ever as we face questions about the efficacy of higher education and growing national and global divisions. Moreover, understanding a temporally distant moment has much to say as we face rapid technological and social change. In my work with humanities internships, I have found that the durable skills honed in Shakespeare scholarship and made available in our classrooms not only prepare students for life after graduation but foster a new generation of innovative and thoughtful leaders. As a member of the Board of Trustees, I hope to shape the future of the SAA by sustaining the foundations of literary analysis and innovative thinking that will expand our reach to new audiences and allow us to contribute to new challenges.

Bio:

Nic Helms is an independent researcher and dramaturg who has taught at Plymouth State University. They are the author of Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare’s Characters (Palgrave, 2019) and the co-editor of Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature (Amsterdam UP, 2024). They perform Shakespeare with New Hampshire’s Advice to the Players, and are an active member and past president of a university chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Their teaching and research are informed by critical disability studies, early modern neurodiversity studies, early modern trans studies, and premodern critical race studies. For the SAA, they co-led a seminar in 2020.

Statement:

The multiple global and national crises of 2020 (pandemic, police brutality, income inequality, attacks on trans existence, etc.), which invariably continue in one form or another, impressed upon me the value of care, access, and humanity in education…values all too often missing in American higher education. The university can gatekeep just as proficiently as it can open doors, and Shakespeare’s works have been used to do both.

So, how can we the Shakespeare Association of America do better by our discipline in this moment? How can we do better by our colleagues, our students, and our communities?

While the SAA seminar remains one of the best formats in our discipline for fostering scholarly community, the traditional conference model of past decades (widespread across academia) has become unsustainable: luxurious hotels in expensive metropolitan areas are driving our Association further and further into debt, even as student debts rise and the adjunctification of academia speeds toward the demographic cliff. SAA’s leadership (both its Trustees and its Executive Committee) need to be carefully yet urgently considering alternatives to this hotel-bound model that increase access to all things ‘Shakespeare’: access for graduate students and early career scholars; for marginalized academics for whom U.S. travel is often especially precarious; and for the college and university communities where our teaching, research, and service is grounded. Such models may include alternative conference housing, increased online and hybrid events, and new models we need to create together. We have been locked into the old model by exploitative hotel contracts for too long. It’s time for a change.

I’m honored to be nominated to run for a position as an SAA Trustee. My experiences as a disabled academic, as a scholar of critical disability studies, and as an AAUP union member, chapter president, and faculty representative at the local, state, and national levels have all prepared me well for conversations about improving access. The Shakespeare Association has made me who I am as a scholar and as a teacher. I’d be thrilled to have this opportunity to give back to the Association as a Trustee.

 Bio:

Gavin Hollis is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY, where he has served in various capacities, most recently as director of undergraduate studies (2023-) and deputy chair (2018-2023) for the English Department, and as Co-Chair of the Hunter College Senate Graduate Curriculum Committee (2024-). He is author of The Absence of America: the London Stage 1576-1642, the inaugural volume in the Early Modern Literary Geographies series for Oxford University Press, and articles, chapters, and theatre and book reviews for Shakespeare Survey, SEL: Studies in English Literature, Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance Quarterly, and Shakespeare Quarterly, Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period and Indography: Writing the Indian in Early Modern England. He has served on the board of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar since 2016 and was a co-organizer of the Knowledge Relations conference at the University of Michigan in 2025. For the SAA, he has led or co-led seminars in 2012, 2017, and 2023 and has convened a panel in 2026. He has also served on the Publics Award committee and the Program Committee for SAA 2027.

Statement:

2026 will mark the twentieth anniversary of my first visit to the Shakespeare Association of America conference. As with many of you, I consider this my conference: the space where I can, for a few days, turn away from my institutional responsibilities, develop my work in concert with others, and learn about the field as a whole across many diverse subject areas. My work would not be anything close to publishable without SAA, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Yet my first conference – as a nerve-wracked graduate student – is still a vivid memory. And while it was a positive experience (I have, after all, kept coming back), even now I’ll admit to a sense of trepidation each time the conference rolls around. I know that in this I am far from alone. Coming to a conference can be a fraught process, even at the best of times.

If elected, I would want to build on the work of SAA leadership, which has cultivated a space that is open, accessible, and welcoming. As trustee I would want to focus on four areas in particular. First, I would want to ensure that the programming – for example the introduction of the Next Gen Plen, the platforming of emerging subfields, the wide array of subject areas in the seminar and workshop listings – continues to foster the positive atmosphere of the conference, and also work to promote emerging subfields and develop new fora for discussion and knowledge exchange to go alongside our existing ones. Second, as someone from an institution with a heavy teaching focus, I see it as vital that SAA dedicates programing time and space to education and the relationship between pedagogy, performance, and research. Third, I also want to create space for even greater dialogue between SAA leadership and its members, so as to help demystify the organization and ensure that there continue to be pathways for newer generations of leadership across the different levels of the organization. And finally, as someone born outside the US, it is also important to me that the organization is truly international—an especially pressing concern at a time when travelling here can be a challenge for many of our members.

We all know that higher education is at an inflection point. Limited funding and access to resources, coupled with shrinking departments and a dwindling job pool, could make us all turn inward, saving what we can for ourselves. SAA has done an admirable job, in rhetoric and in action, of orienting us instead to the collective possibilities; indeed, as we know, Shakespeare can be a powerful vehicle for dialogue and change. Our precarities, felt at some level by all, are hardly a blessing, but they can also unite us in our common pursuits. If elected I will work hard to ensure that SAA meets the moment.

Bio:

Vimala Pasupathi is Professor of English at Hofstra University, where she currently serves as Associate Chair and has previously held the roles of Associate Dean of the Stuart and Nancy Rabinowicz Honors College and the Second Vice President of Collective Bargaining for Hofstra’s AAUP Chapter. Her work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Modern Philology, ELH, Early Theatre, and Shakespeare, as well as several edited collections, most recently Histories of the Future: On Shakespeare and Thinking Ahead (2024) and None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024). She is currently completing The Militia Theater, 1558-1662: Stages of Obligation in English Drama and British History. For the SAA she co-led seminars in 2013 and 2017, served on the Nominating committee in 2020, the Digital Strategies Committee in 2017 and the Travel Grants Committee in 2014.

Statement:

As a regular attendee at the annual conference, I know the SAA as the event where I will see my dear friends and begin to look forward to my research in the Summer. In the past decade, the SAA’s leadership has rightly prioritized the goal of making the organization more inclusive––and has succeeded in a variety of senses. I admire the efforts it has made to support the participation of historically underrepresented groups, from scholars of color and contingent faculty to early career researchers and graduate students. I have very much appreciated seeing the visible gains of these efforts. As a new Trustee, I would appreciate the opportunity to work more directly on them in their current forms and in new initiatives. My vision also entails another mode of inclusion, albeit one that I admit will seem, by comparison, less urgent or pressing. It has long been my hope that the SAA could do more to promote scholarship on non-Shakespearean poetry and drama, particularly the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, but also his predecessors and literary heirs. To give more space to the dramatists of his time and those he influenced later is not to dilute his importance, but to appreciate it more fully; the more I have become attuned to the work of less canonical figures, the more I have deepened my understanding of Shakespeare and what his works offer us. Under the rubric of “Shakespeare And,” I’d like to leverage the power and familiarity of our beloved singular man to keep the study of the less well known writers afloat at a time of few rising tides and many sinking boats. Many of us find our colleagues at our home institutions ill-equipped for evaluating its importance, and the SAA could be a good partner steward in this particular regard. Whether it means developing a new award, providing more regular or prominent placement in the conference program, or something else entirely, I would work for an SAA that is more representative––not only of the ecosystem in which Shakespeare wrote, but also of the vibrant research that the SAA’s members could do (and that many do already) on other early modern writers.