Issue 3—2000

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).

Tennessee Williams

Linda Dorff

The late Linda Dorff was Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Theory and Criticism in the School of Theatre at the University of Houston. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1997. In addition to editing a book of interviews, Working with Tennessee, she produced and directed a documentary film for public television entitled Tennessee Williams' Dragon Country: The Late Plays. She was Advisor to the Hartford Stage Company's decade-long Tennessee Williams Marathon.

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.

Michael Paller

Dramaturg and Director of Humanities
American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco

Michael Paller is dramaturg and director of humanities for the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and also teaches in their M.F.A. acting conservatory. Since joining A.C.T. in August 2005, he has dramaturged more than thirty mainstage productions and several readings in A.C.T.’s First Look series of new work, including plays by Ping Chong, José Rivera, Lillian Groag, and Philip Kan Gotanda. He has been a dramaturg and literary manager at several theatres, including the George Street Playhouse, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, the Long Wharf Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre, and others. He is the author of Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-20th Century Drama (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) and Tennessee Williams: The Playwright in Context (Smith & Kraus, 2010), as well as several essays on Williams’s work.

Gilbert Debusscher

Professor of English and American Literature
University of Brussels in Belgium

Gilbert Debusscher is Professor of English and American Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Brussels in Belgium. He is the author or editor of books and articles on Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Jack Richardson, Edward Bond, Willy Russell, and avant-garde drama.

Brian Parker

Emeritus Professor of English
University of Toronto

Brian Parker is emeritus professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he has also served as director of graduate English studies, dean of arts, and vice provost of Trinity College. His wide ranging scholarship includes books and articles on Elizabethan drama and the works of Tennessee Williams.

Jacqueline O’Connor

Professor of English
Boise State University

Jacqueline O’Connor is a professor of English at Boise State University. She is the author of Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater (2013) and Dramatizing Dementia: Madness in the Plays of Tennessee Williams.

2000 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover