Issue 19—2020

R. Barton Palmer

Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus
Clemson University

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program and served as its first director. He has worked with the Tennessee Williams Annual Review as a contributor for more than two decades and assumed the role of editor in 2017. With Robert Bray he published Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America and edited the multiauthor volume Modern American Drama on Screen. Recently, with Homer B. Pettey, he published ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks. Palmer has published widely on US and world cinema history, on topics including film noir, film theory, and directors such as the Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh, and Michael Curtiz, among others. An award-winning editor and translator of medieval French poetry, he published the edited volume Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature in 2022. Palmer also serves as the editor of the South Atlantic Review and is a book series editor at a number of academic presses.

Tom Mitchell

Head of the Theatre Department
University of Illinois

Tom Mitchell is professor emeritus of theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and scholar-in-residence for the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. Mitchell edited Tennessee Williams’s story “Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?” for first-time publication (Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2020) and adapted it for performance at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. His essay “Tennessee Williams Wrestles with Race in Three Unpublished Works: ‘Goat Song,’ ‘Heavenly Grass,’ and ‘Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?’” appeared in the 2019 issue of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and he is the editor of a forthcoming edition of previously unpublished stories by Williams, “The Caterpillar Dogs” and Other Early Stories. Mitchell has adapted “The Men from the Polar Star” for the 2023 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.

Tennessee Williams

Dirk Gindt

Professor of Theater Studies
Stockholm University

Dirk Gindt, professor of theater studies at Stockholm University, has published more than twenty refereed journal articles and book chapters on Swedish, Canadian, and French theater and served as coeditor of the volume Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century (2018). His 2019 monograph Tennessee Williams in Sweden and France, 1945–1965 unpacks the sexual anxieties and racial fantasies that the US playwright’s works provoked in postwar Europe. Gindt recently published the coedited volume Berätta, överleva, inte drunkna, which explores anti-racism, decolonization, and migration in contemporary Swedish theater (2022). His current research, financed by a four-year grant from the Swedish Research Council, analyzes the decolonial labor of Indigenous Sámi performance and is conducted in consultation and close dialogue with Giron Sámi Teáhter in Kiruna/Giron.

Gabe C. Alfieri

Musicologist and Professional Musician

Gabe C. Alfieri is a musicologist and professional musician living in the Boston area. He holds a PhD in historical musicology from Boston University and teaches at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island.

Daniel Ciba

Assistant Professor of Theater
Ramapo College of New Jersey

Daniel Ciba is assistant professor of theater (history and criticism) at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He holds an MA from Villanova University and a PhD from Tufts University, serves as associate editor of the University of Iowa Press’s Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, and is the incoming book review editor for Theatre Annual. His book project in progress is entitled Blue Roses: Tennessee Williams, Memory, and the Queer Archive.

Tison Pugh

Professor of English
University of Central Florida

Tison Pugh is Pegasus Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. His books include Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon (2016), Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies (2014), and the edited collection, Queering the South on Screen (2020).

Bess Rowen

Villanova University

Bess Rowen is assistant professor in the theater department at Villanova University. She is the author of The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021), and her work focuses on what she terms “affective stage directions,” a topic she explored in her 2016 Tennessee Williams Annual Review essay “Completing the Sentence with a Gesture.” She serves as the performance review editor for the Eugene O’Neill Review and serves on the board of the Eugene O’Neill Society.

Robert Bray

Middle Tennessee State University

Robert Bray, professor emeritus at Middle Tennessee State University, is founding and consulting editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and founding director of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. He has written dozens of essays and entries on Williams’s work and is the coauthor (with Barton Palmer) of Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (2009) and author-editor of Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2007). Bray also coedited (with Palmer) Modern American Drama on Screen (2013) and Modern British Drama on Screen (2013).

2020 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover