Issue 23—2024

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.

Thomas Keith

Consulting Editor
New Directions Publishing

Thomas Keith, consulting editor at New Directions Publishing, has edited more than twenty Tennessee Williams titles since 2002, and he has written introductions for A House Not Meant to Stand (2008) and Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws (2016) as well as the notes for The Magic Tower and Other One-Act Plays (2011). He is coeditor of The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin (2018) and editor of the essay collection Love, Christopher Street (2012). Keith has also written extensively about the poet Robert Burns: he is the author of the bibliography Robert Burns’s Life on the Stage (2022), and his chapter on Burns and Frederick Douglass appears in The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns (2024). A 2004 Roy Fellow of Scottish Studies at the University of South Carolina, he appeared in the BBC documentaries How Auld Lang Syne Took Over the World (2013) and Burns in the USA (2017). His writing has appeared in American Theatre, Gay and Lesbian Review, and Studies in Scottish Literature. He has served as dramaturge for Sundance Institute Theater Lab and teaches theater at Pace University.

Tennessee Williams

Ciarán Leinster

Ciarán Leinster is an American studies scholar based in Dublin. He completed his PhD in 2019, and his first book, on postmodernism in the late plays of Arthur Miller, is scheduled to publish in late 2024. He has edited an annotated student edition of Miller’s The Last Yankee, and his writing has appeared in the Arthur Miller Journal, the Irish Journal of American Studies, Horror Studies, and US Studies Online. Currently he works in the Access and Lifelong Learning Centre in University College Dublin.

John S. Bak

Université de Lorraine (France)

John S. Bak, Professor at the Université de Lorraine in France, holds degrees from the universities of Illinois and Ball State and the Sorbonne. A former Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic in 1995, he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard (2011), Columbia (2013), the University of Texas (2014), and Oxford (2014–16). His books on Williams include Tennessee Williams and Europe (2014), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Henry I. Schvey

Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature
Washington University in St. Louis

Henry I. Schvey is professor of drama and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to coming to St. Louis, he was a professor of English at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he founded the Leiden English Speaking Theatre. In addition to having published widely on modern European and American drama, he is the author of several original plays, including an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. His coming-of-age memoir, The Poison Tree, was published in 2016. His writing on Williams includes the volumes Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams (2021) and The Plastic Art of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual Arts (forthcoming).

Marianne DiQuattro

Associate Professor of Theater
Rollins College

Marianne DiQuattro is an associate professor of theater at Rollins College. Her research interests include modern and contemporary comparative drama, performance history, and theater and disability.

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.

Annette J. Saddik

Professor of Theatre and Literature
City University of New York and
New York City College of Technology

Annette J. Saddik is CUNY Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Literature, with a dual teaching appointment at the Graduate Center PhD Program in Theatre and New York City College of Technology Department of English. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama and performance, particularly the work of Tennessee Williams, and has published four books, as well as numerous essays in scholarly journals, international theater playbills, newspapers, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Her most recent book, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer (2015), contextualizes Williams’s plays through what she terms a “theatre of excess,” which seeks liberation through grotesque exaggeration, chaos, and ambivalent laughter. Saddik lectures and advises on productions both nationally and internationally as a dramaturge, participates regularly in audience “talk-backs” for Broadway and Off-Broadway performances, and serves on the boards of academic journals and as a voter for the Lucille Lortel Theatre Awards. She is currently working on her fifth book, Clowning Around? Reimagining Political Transformation in Late-Twentieth-Century Grotesque Theatre, which centers on the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation in plays that reacted to systems of oppression on various continents during the second half of the twentieth century.

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.

Stephen Cedars

Stephen Cedars writer, director, teacher, and scholar whose plays have been published, produced, or developed throughout the US and Canada. He has created new theatrical work as a director in New York City for more than twenty years. His scholarship has been published in journals throughout the US and UK. He is currently a PhD candidate in theater and performance with the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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.

Matthew Roudané

Matthew Roudané, Regents’ Professor of English and Theater at Georgia State University, Atlanta, has published fourteen books on various aspects of American drama, including the edited collections Conversations with Arthur Miller (1987), Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1995), The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (1997), and The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller (2017), and he is currently at work on a new edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Arthur Miller. He serves on the editorial boards of several scholarly journals, including the Arthur Miller Journal.

Tiffany Gilbert

Professor and Department Chair
University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Tiffany Gilbert is professor and chair of the English department at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She has published essays on the films Carmen Jones, Imitation of Life, Plenty, My Left Foot, The Rose Tattoo, and The Fugitive Kind. Her recent work has focused on the 1898 Wilmington massacre and coup. She is a codirector of Wilmington 1898: Geographies of Rage, Resistance, and Resilience, a 2024 NEH Summer Institute, and she is currently coediting The 1898 Wilmington Massacre: Critical Explorations of Insurrection, Black Resilience, and Black Futures

2024 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover