Keynote Speakers
Linda Ben-Zvi
Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor Emeritae, Theatre Studies, Colorado State University and Tel Aviv University, was John Stern Distinguished Professor, Colorado; Lady Davis Professor, Hebrew University; Fellow at the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC; the Newberry Library, Chicago; and the Bogliasco Foundation, Liguria. She was twice president of the International Samuel Beckett Society, and initiated and chaired the Beckett Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) for 14 years.
She has been Visiting Professor at Waseda and Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan; the University of Trento and Venice International University, Italy; Doctoral Seminar Professor, at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain; and University of Michigan, New York University, and Hunter College, New York. Of her 13 authored and edited books, four are on Beckett and four on Susan Glaspell, including the biography Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), winner of the Jury Prize of the American Theatre Library Association.
Stephen Scott-Bottoms
Stephen Scott-Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, UK. His books include The Theatre of Sam Shepard (1998), Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2000), Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (2004), Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island (2007, with Matthew Goulish), and Sex, Drag and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance (2010, with Diane Torr). He was editor of Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee (2005). Steve is an active theatre-maker, and has in recent years developed numerous outdoor performances on environmental themes, with the support of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is currently completing a new book with the draft title Incarceration Games, dealing with the history of “theatrical” social psychology experiments.
Naomi Wallace
Naomi Wallace’s plays have been produced in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe and the Middle East and include One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Vision of the Middle East, And I and Silence, The Liquid Plain, Night is a Room and an adaptation of Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani and The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon (both adaptations co-written with Ismail Khalidi).
Awards: Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Horton Foote Award, MacArthur Award, Obie, Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the inaugural Windham Campbell prize for drama.
Wallace is under commission with the Hampstead Theater in London and is writing the book for the new John Mellencamp musical, Jack and Diane.
Harvey Young
Harvey Young is a cultural historian whose research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals and profiled in major newspapers and magazines. As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Vanity Fair and People.
He is the author of three books, Embodying Black Experience, Theatre & Race, and (with Mecca Zabriskie) Black Theatre is Black Life; and the editor of five books, including The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre. His ninth book, Theatre After Empire (coedited with Megan Geigner) will be published in May 2021.
He is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, where he is also Professor of Theatre Arts and Professor of English. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Young was Professor and Chair of Theatre at Northwestern University.
Professor Young is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.
He has served on the boards of numerous arts and educational organizations, including the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), American Society for Theatre Research, and African American Arts Alliance of Chicago.
A former Harvard and Stanford faculty fellow, Dr. Young graduated with honors from Yale and holds a Ph.D. from Cornell. He is an elected Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.
David Palmer
Until his retirement a few years ago, David Palmer taught philosophy and literature at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, a college that prepares students for careers in the merchant marine and environmental protection. His interest in ethics, theories of the self, and philosophy of mind led him to explore modern American tragedies as depictions of how the self is created and goes into crisis.
In theatre studies, he has published primarily on Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett. He recently edited two anthologies: Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama and Arthur Miller for the Twenty-First Century.
He is the current president of the Arthur Miller Society and a board member of the Eugene O’Neill Society.