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Contributors
Asbjørn Aarseth has been a Professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Bergen since 1985 and was Adjunct Professor at the Ibsen Study Center, University of Oslo, from 1996 to 2001. He was editor of Edda: Scandinavian Journal of Literary Research from 1986 to 1990 and has published books and articles on subjects in Scandinavian literary history, on the period concepts of realism (1981) and Romanticism (1985), on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1975), and on Ibsen’s modern prose plays (1999). He is currently engaged as associate editor of Henrik Ibsen’s writings.
Bilha Blum teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies and in the Interdisciplinary Program of the Arts at Tel-Aviv University. She has published extensively on theoretical issues concerning play and performance analysis, modern drama and theatre, theatre and media, poetic drama, and specifically, the drama of Federico Garcia Lorca. Her forthcoming book, Classic Drama as Israeli Theatre, discusses aspects of cultural transference and audience reception of canonical plays in Israeli theatre.
Kyle Gillette is a PhD candidate in drama in his fourth year at Stanford University. He writes about and teaches modern and contemporary avant-garde drama, performance practices, and theory. As a director, dramatist, performer, and critic he seeks to interrogate the phenomenology of theatre as it relates to perception offstage. He has directed plays ranging from Robinson Jeffers’ Medea to Karl Valentin’s The Christmas Tree Stand, to Peter Handke’s Kaspar. The main performer and his major collaborator on Kaspar, Rachel Joseph, has gone on with Kyle to co-create original works based on memory, home, travel, and the blurry boundaries that separate video, performance, and life. Kyle is currently writing a dissertation about theatre artists who engage the space, time, and motion of travel – particularly how spatial and temporal [End Page 222] perceptions aboard modern modes of transportation express themselves in the space and time of theatre.
Martha Greene Eads serves as Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Language and Literature Department at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA. She earned a BA in English and an MA in religion from Wake Forest University, and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include modern drama, contemporary Southern fiction, and detective fiction, and her articles on those topics have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Christianity and Literature, the Cresset, Modern Drama, and Theology.
Antonina Harbus teaches English literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has published Helena of Britain in Medieval Legend (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002) and The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) as well as articles on English language and poetics. She edited, with Russell Poole, a collection of articles on medieval linguistic and cultural exchanges, Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, to be published by University of Toronto Press in early 2005. Her current research focuses on metaphor and the drama of direct discourse in poetry.
Graham Ley is Reader in Drama and Theory in the University of Exeter. He publishes on the modern and contemporary theatre, notably on modernism/postmodernism and performance theory, as well as on performance in the ancient Greek theatre. He serves as joint editor of the series Theatre and Performance Practices for Palgrave-Macmillan, and of the series Performance Studies for the University of Exeter Press. He is currently leading a major project researching and documenting the history and practice of British Asian theatre, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK. In the fall of 1984, he was Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre in the University of New South Wales.
John Mckellor Reid is principal lecturer in drama in the School of English and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has just completed a book-length study of Chekhov’s plays entitled Being and Polemic in Chekhovian Comedy. His version of Marivaux’s The Island of Slaves is being staged in Bristol and Bath in 2005.
Beth Meszaros, Professor of English/Communications at College of Southern Maryland, is the author of one full-length study of contemporary drama, The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama (1990). She has published on the phenomenology of painful and extreme embodiment as well as representations [End Page 223] of the disabled body in theatre: “‘Enlightened by Our Afflictions’: Figurations of Disability in the Comic Theatre of Beth Henley and Martin McDonagh” appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly in fall 2003; “Beyond Disability: Staging the Grotesque Body” was published in Disability Studies: Definitions and Diversity (1994). “‘Der Straf-block’: Performance and Execution in Barnes, Griffiths, and Wertenbaker,” which appeared in Modern Drama (1993), studies the staging of public execution and contemporary scaffold plays by Peter Barnes, Trevor Griffiths, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. She has also written on performance art: “Beyond Offending the Audience: Violating the Audience Body” is a study of the California “risk/pain” artists of the 1970s (Contemporary Theatre Review 1996).
Ricardo Ortíz teaches U.S. Latino literature in the English Department at Georgetown University; in 2004, he finished a book-length project entitled Diaspora and Disappearance: Political and Cultural Erotics in Cuban America as well as two additional articles, one on Arturo Islas and the other on Edwidge Danticat.
Craig N. Owens teaches performance theory, drama studies, and Irish literature at Drake University in Des Moines, IA. He writes and presents on embodiment in representation, absurdism, identity theory, and desire. Currently, he serves as Secretary of the International Harold Pinter Society and sits on the Executive Committee of the Midwest Modern Language Society. With Kyle Schlabach, he is co-authoring the Historical Dictionary of Irish Drama, due out from Scarecrow Press in 2006.
Richard Rankin Russell is an Assistant Professor of English at Baylor University, where he teaches British and Irish literature. He has published essays in New Hibernia Review, English Language Notes, Colby Quarterly, and Journal of Modern Literature. His current book project explores the work of the Belfast Group writers in the context of regionalism and reconciliation.
