Issue 18—2019

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.

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).

Edwina Dakin Williams

Julie Vatain-Corfdir

Associate Professor of English
Sorbonne Université

Julie Vatain-Corfdir is associate professor of English at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on the dramatic text—on the page, on stage, and in translation. She is the author of a monograph on dramatic translation (Traduire la lettre vive [2012], winner of the SAES/AFEA book of the year award in 2013) and has edited or coedited Lectures de Tom Stoppard: Arcadia (2011), La scène en version originale (2015), and American Musicals from Stage to Screen (2019). She has published essays on British and United States theater and has translated into French plays by Thornton Wilder; Tina Howe; Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman; Susan Glaspell; and Sarah Ruhl. She is a coeditor of the e-Theatrum Mundi series for Sorbonne Université 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.

Michael Hooper

Michael S. D. Hooper is an independent scholar and private tutor. He is the author of Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire over Protest (2012) and several essays in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and he is the editor of the Methuen Student Edition of A Streetcar Named Desire (2009). He wrote the Williams entry for the online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) and has contributed to A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams, edited by Katherine Weiss (2014). His essay “Pedro Almodóvar’s Homage to Tennessee Williams” appears in Tennessee Williams in Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, edited by John S. Bak (2014), while “A Spectral Future: Dementia and the Nonhuman in Marjorie Prime” is forthcoming in Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction, edited by Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras.

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.

2019 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover