SAA Officers

Ruben Espinosa is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). He is the author of Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014). His work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and New Literary History, among other journals and collections. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Shakespeare Quarterly and Palgrave’s “Early Modern Cultural Studies” series, on the Advisory Board of Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, and on the Executive Board of RaceB4Race. Professor Espinosa is the editor of Shakespeare/Skin (under contract with Bloomsbury), and he is currently at work on his next monograph, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera, which examines how perceptions of legitimacy for U.S. Latinxs often influence the barriers and bridges that define the intersections between Shakespeare and Chicanx culture. He served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2018-21), chairing the Digital Strategies Committee (2018-19) and Nominations Committee (2020-21) and co-chairing the Program Committee (2019-20). He led seminars in 2010 and 2017, and was a plenary speaker in 2022.

Ian Smith is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009) and collaborator on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia (2012). His current monograph, Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race will be published in 2022. He is the founder of the Keefe Colloquium in the Public Humanities and, since 2017, has co-organized its “Shakespeare and Race” series at Lafayette. He is the recipient of multiple fellowships in support of his scholarship, being invited most recently to hold the Los Angeles Times chair in the History and Culture of the Americas at the Huntington Library (2022-23). He also serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly and ELR and the advisory board of Global Shakespeare Inverted. He has published numerous articles and book chapters mainly on Shakespeare and early modern drama. For the SAA, Professor Smith has served on the 2013 Program Committee and the 2016 Sexual Harassment Committee as well as the Executive Director Search Committee in 2017; he led seminars in 2002, 2014 and 2019, and organized the plenary panel for 2022.

Katie Brokaw is associate professor of English at University of California, Merced and co-founding artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite. She authored Shakespeare and Community Performance (2023) and Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama (2016), which won the David Bevington Prize. In 2012, the dissertation upon which it was based won SAA’s J. Leeds Barroll Prize. She edited the Arden Performance edition of Macbeth, co-edited Shakespeare and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare, and published several essays on eco-Shakespeare and early modern drama. She is co-founder of the EarthShakes Alliance, co-organized Globe4Globe: Shakespeare and the Climate Emergency with Shakespeare’s Globe, and has been a plenary speaker for the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA). At UC Merced, she has been department chair and co-created an undergraduate major in Environmental Humanities. For the SAA, she has chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on Conference Futures (2022-present), organized panels for 2021 and 2018 and co-led a seminar in 2015.

Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and researches and teaches on early modern literature and critical race studies, queer studies, and the history of slavery. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of slavery in early modern England, and was awarded the SAA’s 2023 First Book Award as well as the 2023 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for the best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. She co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on “Race and Periodization” and is currently working on a monograph on the construction of racialized gender and racial futurity in the contexts of early modern slavery and imperialism; she is also editing A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series. Her essays and articles appear in a number of journals and edited collections, including Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She is an Executive Board member of RaceB4Race and co-organized the conference RaceB4Race: Genealogies in Toronto in September 2022; in addition, she is a RaceB4Race Mentor in the Mentorship Network. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA LLC Shakespeare Forum and on the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly. For the SAA, she has served on the Program Committee for 2021, on the Local Arrangements Committee for 2019, and on the Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Harassment Policy in 2015. She co-led a seminar in 2020, is co-leading another in 2024, and was a panel speaker in 2018 and 2022.

Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English, Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program, and inaugural Director of the new Center for Gender and Sexuality at Wayne State University in Detroit. She is author of Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations (2016) and coeditor, with Colby Gordon and Will Fisher, the special issue “Early Modern Trans Studies” for JEMCS (2019). Chess is currently working on two book projects, one on Shakespeare and trans culture for the Routledge “Spotlight on Shakespeare” series and another on early modern disability, queerness, and adaptive technologies. With Sawyer Kemp, she is co-editing a volume on early modern trans drama. She serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. For the SAA she was a plenary speaker in 2019; organized seminars in 2010, 2016, 2017, and 2020, presented a digital exhibit in 2021; and served on the Innovative Article Award Committee in 2021 and the SAA Nominations Committee in 2022.

Vanessa I. Corredera is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Andrews University. She is the author of Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America (2022), and with L. Monique Pittman and Geoffrey Way, co-edited the forthcoming collection Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation (2023). She is also working on a second co-edited collection on Shakespeare and Exile with James Sutton and Stephanie Chamberlain. Her scholarship appears in a number of journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, Borrowers and Lenders, and Literature Compass, as well as in collections like The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation and the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. She serves on the editorial board of Shakespeare Bulletin and Borrowers and Lenders, for the latter of which she is also the Digital Appropriations editor. She has served as a mentor in the inaugural RaceB4Race Mentorship Network and as an MLA Delegate representing Race and Ethnicity in the Profession, and as a departmental chair and a Faculty Senator and Senate Officer at her home institution. For SAA, Professor Corredera led seminars in 2019, 2022, and 2023, organized and presented on a panel in 2020, was a panel respondent in 2021, and served on the 2020 program committee.

Drew Daniel is Professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2007. He is the author of three books: 20 Jazz Funk Greats (2008); The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (2013); and Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (2022). In addition to numerous essays in journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly, Social Text, and Criticism among many others, he has contributed to edited collections such as Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (2011), Political Theology and Early Modernity (2012), The Return of Theory in Early Modern Studies (2014), Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts (2017), The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture (2019), and Race & Affect in Early Modern English Literature (2022). In a separate zone of activity, he has had a distinguished career as a producer and collaborator making electronic music as one half of the group Matmos with his musical partner and husband M.C. Schmidt, and as a solo artist under the working alias The Soft Pink Truth. For the SAA, he has served on the 2014 Planning Committee, organized and led a seminar in 2017, and was a panel speaker in 2016.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Professor of English and Graduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research and teaching focus on the effects of globalizing processes, the histories of religion and race, and the relationship between literature and social justice. Her scholarship includes Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (2022), Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010), and Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (co-edited with Elizabeth Williamson, 2011). Her articles and essays have appeared in such journals as Renaissance Drama, PMLA, ELH, and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, as well as in the Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare; her article on the early modern chinaware trade in Studies in Philology received the Louis Round Wilson Prize. Her leadership experience derives from her roles as mentor and advisor to graduate students, as well as her role as co-editor of ELR. For the SAA, Professor Degenhardt has served as a seminar leader in 2008 and 2017, was a worship leader in 2019, and presented on a panel in 2015; she has also served on the 2017 Nominating Committee and the 2021 Innovative Article Award Committee.

Wendy Beth Hyman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of Book Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford, 2019), co-editor with Hillary Eklund of Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh, 2019), editor of The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011), and author of a wide range of essays on Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, the history of science, and pedagogy. With Jennifer Waldron she guest-edited ELR’s special issue, Theorizing Early Modern Fictions, and she is collaborating with artist Clair Wang on a project called How to Read Shakespeare: A Visual Learner’s Companion. She is also writing a monograph called Shakespeare and the Ingenious Machine, about stage romance, wonder technologies, and the manifestation of other worlds. She is the Knowledge editor for the digital encyclopedia, Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World, and a founding member of the humanities collective, The Renaissance Project. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Spenser Society. For the SAA, she led seminars in 2014, 2018, organized a seminar in 2022, organized and presented on a panel in 2008, participated in a roundtable in 2021, and presented on panels in 2016 and 2023. She served on the SAA Program Committee in 2019.

Vin Nardizzi is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, which is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) People. He is author of Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (2013). With Stephen Guy-Bray and Will Stockton, he co-edited Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009); with Jean E. Feerick, The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and with Tiffany Jo Werth, Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto, 2019). He is a founding collaborator of the international research network called “Oecologies.” His leadership experience includes serving on the MLA Forum Executive Committee for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities (2019-24) and as a Member of the MLA Delegate Assembly representing the Western US and Western Canada (2020-23). He also serves on the Advisory Board for Penn State University Press’s series “Cultural Inquiries in English Literature, 1400-1700” and on the Editorial Board of Shakespeare Quarterly. For the SAA Professor Nardizzi has served on the 2015 Program Committee, the 2017 Dissertation Prize Committee, the Executive Director Search Committee in 2017, the 2018 NextGenPlen Committee, the 2020 Nominating Committee and the 2022 Dissertation Prize Committee; he also served on the 2013-14 Vancouver Local Arrangements Committee. He led seminars in 2009 and 2016, presented on a panel in 2013 and a plenary session in 2017.

SAA Officers

President

Ruben Espinosa

Arizona State University

Immediate Past President

Ian Smith

University of Southern California

Trustee

Katie Brokaw

University of California, Merced

Trustee

Urvashi Chakravarty

University of Toronto

Trustee

Simone Chess

Wayne State University

Trustee and Executive Committee Member

Vanessa I. Corredera

Andrews University

Trustee

Drew Daniel

Johns Hopkins University

Trustee

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Trustee

Wendy Beth Hyman

Oberlin College

Trustee

Vin Nardizzi

University of British Columbia