SAA Officers

Bernadette Andrea is Professor in the Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also a core faculty in the Center for Middle East Studies and an affiliate faculty in the Comparative Literature Program and the Department of Feminist Studies. She previously taught at the University of Texas, San Antonio, where she was the Celia Jacobs Endowed Professor in British Literature. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007). She edited the critical edition English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (2012) for the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series. Her co-edited collections include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, with Patricia Akhimie (2019), and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, with Linda McJannet (2011). She serves as co-editor, with Julie Campbell and Allyson Poska, of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and was director of the Early Modern Center at UCSB from 2018 to 2021. For the SAA, she has led or co-led seminars in 2009, 2013, 2016, and 2021; she presented on a plenary panel in 2019; and she was elected to the Executive Committee in 2021.

Ian Smith is the Richard H., Jr. ’60 and Joan K. Sell Professor in the Humanities in the department of English at Lafayette College. He 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.

Farah Karim-Cooper is Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe and Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London. She was the 2013 Lloyd Davis Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland, and Chair of the Globe Architecture Research Group that led the research into the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. She is an editorial Board Member for the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and an executive board member of RaceB4Race. Her books include Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2006; rev. 2019), The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage (2016) and is editor of Titus Andronicus: The State of Play (2019). For the SAA, she has served as Trustee from 2017-20, served on the 2017 Program Committee, chaired the 2018 Travel Awards and 2019 Nominations Committees, and co-chairs the 2020 Program and Digital Exhibits Committees.

Patricia Akhimie is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark; she is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018) and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019). She is currently working on a book about early modern women’s travel as well as a new edition of Othello. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Ford Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. She was a roundtable speaker in 2013, a panel speaker in 2019, co-led a seminar in 2016 and served on the 2016 Ad Hoc Sexual Harassment Committee and 2019 Nominating Committee.

Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and coeditor of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018). He is currently coediting a special issue of Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race” and working on two monographs, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Human Difference on the Early Modern Stage and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England. At the SAA, he has presented on a 2017 roundtable and served on the Program Committee for the 2020 Annual Meeting.

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.

Michelle M. Dowd is Hudson Strode Professor of English and Director of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Women’s Work in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2009), which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, and of The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (2015). In addition to publishing over 30 scholarly essays, she has co-edited Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England with Julie E. Eckerle (2007); Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama with Natasha Korda (2011); Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology with Thomas Festa (2012); and Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater with Ronda Arab and Adam Zucker (2015). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, and she is the editor of a book series, Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by the University of Alabama Press. For the SAA she served on the Program Committee for 2018, the Travel Awards Committee in 2010 and 2016, led or co-led seminars in 2021, 2020, 2011, 2008 and presented on a panel in 2017. In 2021 she chaired the Shakespeare Publics Award Committee.

Stephen Guy-Bray is professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and poetics. He is the author of four books, including Shakespeare and Queer Representation (2020), Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (2009) as well as the co-editor of two volumes of essays; he has published numerous articles and book chapters, chiefly on Renaissance literature but also on literature ranging from 250 BCE to the 1960s. He is currently working on a book on line endings in Renaissance poetry. He has served on the 2013 Program Committee, led a seminar in 2007, and co-led seminars in 2009, 2011, and 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

Bernadette Andrea

University of California, Santa Barbara

Vice-President

Ian Smith

Lafayette College

Immediate Past President

Farah Karim-Cooper

Shakespeare's Globe

Trustee

Patricia Akhimie

Rutgers University, Newark

Trustee

Dennis Britton

University of British Columbia

Trustee

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Trustee

Michelle M. Dowd

University of Alabama

Trustee

Stephen Guy-Bray

University of British Columbia

Trustee

Vin Nardizzi

University of British Columbia