Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill. His ideas about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio IDEAS series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson), editions of Richard II (with Dawson) and The Tempest (with JF Bernard) and co-edited books such as Making Publics in Early Modern Europe, Forms of Association, and Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body. He publishes non-academic essays about Shakespeare and modern life such as “Sexual Justice: Thinking with Shakespeare” and “Tragedy as a Way of Life.” He is presently leading TRaCE Transborder, a project that is tracking the career paths and telling the stories of humanities PhD grads on five continents.
Michael Bristol had to stay after school in grade nine for laughing at the bawdy jokes in Pyramus and Thisby. Later he received his BA in English at Yale magna cum laude, and his PhD at Princeton, focusing on Renaissance non-dramatic literature. While teaching at the University of Illinois he co-directed Hamlet and appeared onstage as Guildenstern. He has also directed and productions of Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida. His publications include three books, several edited collections of essays, and numerous articles on all aspects of Shakespeare scholarship. He is currently Greenshields Professor Emeritus of English at McGill.
ALT BIO: A virus gets inside you and makes copies of itself. I probably caught it in grade nine when Aurora was my Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or was it that course I took with Maynard Mack at Yale? I was more careful at Princeton, where I studied everything but Shakespeare. But then at Illinois, the Chair asked me to teach an introductory Shakespeare course. For the next 43 years I spread the contagion in every class I taught, every play I directed and every book and article I published. There is no vaccine for this.
David B. Goldstein serves as Professor of English and coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at York University in Toronto. His first monograph, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, shared the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award in 2013. A former restaurant critic and food magazine editor, he has also published three co-edited essay collections on topics related to Shakespeare, food, and early modern hospitality; two books of poetry; and a range of essays on literature, food studies, Emmanuel Levinas, ecology, and contemporary poetics. For four years he co-directed the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Mellon-funded research collaboration, Before “Farm to Table”: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures.
Jennifer Drouin is the author of Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation (2014) as well as numerous essays on early modern gender and sexuality and contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare. She is the editor of Shakespeare / Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality (2020). Formerly a tenured Associate Professor of English in the United States, she regularly teaches a bilingual law course at McGill University where she completed her PhD, postdoctoral fellowship, and BCL and LLB degrees in civil law and common law.
Marie Trotter is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at McGill University, researching metatheatre and audience reception in performance of Shakespeare’s plays. Her dissertation explores the role of Shakespeare’s metatheatrical characters and lines in shaping audience enjoyment, participation, and delight. In her spare time, Marie writes plays, poetry, and arts criticism; her work can be found in the magazines Ekstasis, Broadview, Plough, and Intermission.
Anna Lewton-Brain (BA Vind, MA Dal, PhD McGill) is a full-time faculty member of the Department of English at Dawson College and part-time lecturer at McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal. Her recently defended (2022) doctoral dissertation, “Metaphysical Music,” is a study of the musical qualities and contexts of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw. Her research and publications focus on the intersections of music, poetry, and religion in Early Modern English culture.
Ingrid Lassek received her BA (English Honours) from UBC, her MA from McGill in 2022 and is now in her second year of a PhD in German Studies. Her MA Thesis, “‘On Your Imaginary Forces Work’: Shakespeare in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” is a historical-literary survey, and is the foundation for her doctoral research on the concept of wonder in Shakespeare’s plays in context with his reception in eighteenth-century Germany. She is a TA and course lecturer at McGill University. Her research interests include the literary movements Sensibility and Sturm and Drang, Shakespeare in South Africa, the history of emotions, and the concept of wonder.
Susanna Jack is a retired psychiatric nurse and psychoanalyst who remembers with great pleasure her undergraduate and graduate studies in English literature, especially the plays of Shakespeare, and the poems of the 17th century metaphysical poets and of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Their words and insights have been very helpful her in her work: lines of poetry that come inadvertently to mind when listening well to a patient, or to anyone can bring unexpected understanding of the story behind the story.
Frédérique LeBel is a Shakespeare scholar particularly interested in performance, specifically contemporary productions of Hamlet. Her MA research project, completed under the supervision of Dr. Fiona Ritchie at McGill, was an in-depth exploration of three modern Ophelias in performance and how directorial choices either help or hinder her legibility on the stage.
She is now teaching English as a Second Language at Vincent-d’Indy School of Music while preparing applications for doctorate programs to continue her work on Ophelia in performance. Though music takes much room in her teaching, she still finds a way to bring Shakespeare in the classroom.
Haider Ali (he/him) is an undergraduate student majoring in English literature and minoring in Italian studies at McGill University. His main areas of interest include Shakespeare, Renaissance English poetry more broadly, and French post-war anti-humanist theory, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis. His current favourite play by the bard is Coriolanus, on which he is writing his undergraduate research essay.
To be continued…
Shakespeare and Performance Research Team 