An Interview with W.B. Worthen

W.B. Worthen is is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of several books ranging across drama, theatre, and performance studies, including Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and most recently Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Drama: Between Poetry and Performance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is the editor of The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, and of the award-winning Modern Drama: Plays, Criticism, Theory; he is the former editor of the professional journals Modern Drama and Theatre Journal, and his articles have appeared in PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, TDR, Modern Drama, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere. He has received numerous awards and grants, including the J.L. Styan Collegiate Professorship, University of Michigan, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; he has also won teaching awards from the University of Texas, Northwestern University, and University of Michigan. Most recently, he has been a fellow of the “Interweaving Performance Cultures,” International Research Center of the Free University, Berlin. He is the past editor of the professional journals Modern Drama and Theatre Journal, and a winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Research Award.

Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney, Associate Professor, Chair of the British and Commonwealth Studies Department, University of Lodz, Poland. She has been a Fellow of the Kosciuszko Foundation, Fulbright, the Folger Shakespeare Institute, and the Huntington Library. She has authored numerous articles and essays, internationally and locally, on Shakespeare’s global authority in early modern and modern culture. She is a member of the WSB and a co-editor of the journal Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation, Performance. Her latest monographs (in Polish and in English) are devoted to Shakespeare’a international reception (2014; 2017) and to the contribution of women to international Shakespeare studies (2013).