SAA Officers
President
Lucy Munro
King's College London
Lucy Munro is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King’s College London. Her teaching covers such areas as Shakespeare’s London contexts, premodern race and gender, theatre history, and Shakespeare on screen. She is the author of Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory(2005), Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590-1674 (2013) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King’s Men (2020), and the editor of a number of early modern plays, including Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (2010) and Dekker, Ford and Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (2016). She is co-general editor of two series: the Revels Plays Companion Library with Sarah Dustagheer, Peter Kirwan and David McInnis; and Arden Shakespeare Intersections with Sonia Massai and Gordon McMullan. She is on the editorial boards of English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Survey. With Farah Karim-Cooper she was founding co-director of the Shakespeare Centre London, a collaboration between King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe. She was a Trustee of the SAA in 2019-2022, during which time she chaired the Nominating Committee and the NextGenPlen Committee, and co-chaired the Programme Committee with Joyce Green MacDonald. She was a member of the Programme Committee in 2016. She has participated in the annual conference as speaker and panel organiser (2011 and 2019) and seminar co-organiser (2007 and 2014).
Trustee
Katherine Steele Brokaw
University of Texas at Austin
Katherine Steele Brokaw is Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of English at University of Texas at Austin. 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.
Trustee
Urvashi Chakravarty
University of Toronto
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.
Trustee
Simone Chess
Wayne State University
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.
Trustee
Timothy Francisco
Youngstown State University
Timothy Francisco is professor of English and Director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University (YSU) where he is Distinguished Professor in Service, Scholarship and Teaching. He teaches Shakespeare, Working Class Literature and LGBTQ+ Literature, and has published articles and chapters on Shakespeare, The Profession, Christopher Marlowe, US politics, and journalism education. With Sharon O’Dair, he co-edited Shakespeare and the 99%: Literary Studies, the Profession, and The Production of Inequity (2019) and is co-editing Titanic Optimism: Teaching Shakespeare in Tempestuous Times with O’Dair and Craig Dionne for Bloomsbury (2025). He has served on the SAA Program Committee, Nominations Committee, Diversity Committee, and The Barabara Hogdon Awards Committee. He has led, co-led, and participated in SAA seminars, workshops, roundtables, and seminars. A former journalist, he has published on wide ranging topics for newspapers, magazines, and wire. He co-founded an award-winning statewide student/professional accountability journalism co-op with funding from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and consulted on a National Science Foundation grant for increased equity in STEM. He is board member and former chair of the $100 million Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, and hosts a weekly public affairs program on a local NPR affiliate. He was recently named a Centennial Scholar by the University of Alabama where he earned his Ph.D., in English.
Trustee
Penelope H. Geng
Macalester College
Penelope Geng (she/her) is associate professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Her research and teaching encompass law and literature, critical disability studies, critical race studies, religion and literature, and performance. The author of Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (Toronto, 2021), her articles on Shakespeare, law, historical formalism, and disability have been published in journals such as Studies in Philology, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare. Currently, she is working on 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 University Press. 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 Professor 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 the “Staging Citizenship” panel in 2023.
Trustee
Gavin Hollis
Hunter College, CUNY
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.
Trustee
Laura Kolb
Baruch College, CUNY
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, with Jessica Rosenberg, of a special issue of ELR on the topic of comic epistemologies (2025), which grew out of an 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 Measure for Measure: A Critical Reader (2025). She has written for a broader public in essays and reviews in Book Post, Electric Literature and the TLS. She serves on the board of the Columbia Shakespeare Seminar and as a contributing editor to the Shakespeare Newsletter. At Baruch, she has co-led faculty seminars on inclusive pedagogy and hybrid teaching; she received the Barbara Reich Gluck Teaching Award in 2020.
Trustee
Vimala Pasupathi
Hofstra University
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.
Trustee
Kathryn Vomero Santos
Trinity University
Kathryn Vomero Santos is Associate Professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of Shakespeare in Tongues (2025) and the co-editor of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera, Volumes 1 and 2 (2023 and 2024), The Ethical Implications of Shakespeare in Performance and Appropriation (2024), and Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk and Other Renaissance Fable Translations (2017). Santos is a co-founder, with Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos, of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (BSC), a multidisciplinary, multigenerational group of scholars, educators, artists, and activists who engage with Shakespeare in ways that reflect the languages, cultures, and 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 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, Professor 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.