Issue 15—2016

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).

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.

Dorothy Shapiro

Tennessee Williams

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).

Neil Sinyard

Emeritus Professor of Film Studies
University of Hull, UK

Neil Sinyard is emeritus professor of film studies at the University of Hull, UK. He has published over twenty books on film, including monographs on directors such as Wyler, Wilder, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Zinnemann, Roeg, Lester, Clayton, and Allen, as well as books on adaptation, film comedy, silent movies, representations of childhood on screen, and Graham Greene. He wrote the booklet notes for the Tennessee Williams on Screen season at the Irish Film Institute in 2011 and was a contributor to the book Modern American Drama on Screen (2013). He is working on a book on the films of George Stevens.

John Sykes

Professor of English and Religion
Wingate University

John Sykes is Mary and Harry Brown Professor of English and Religion at Wingate University. He is author of The Romance of Innocence and the Myth of History: Faulkner’s Religious Critique of Southern Culture (1990) and Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation (2007). His work has appeared in such journals as Flannery O’Connor Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Renascence, Journal of Literature and Theology, Religion and Literature, and Modern Theology and in the volumes Flannery O’Connor in an Age of Terrorism (2010) and Modern American Drama on Screen (2013).

Brenda Murphy

Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, emeritus
University of Connecticut

Brenda Murphy is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Connecticut and has served as president of the American Theatre and Drama Society and the Eugene O’Neill Society. Her scholarly work places American drama, theatre, and performance in the broader context of American literature and culture. Among her nineteen books are The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (2014), Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992), and, as editor, Critical Insights: Tennessee Williams (2011) and Critical Insights: A Streetcar Named Desire (2010).

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.

Mary F. Brewer

Senior Lecturer in English and Drama
Loughborough University, UK

Mary F. Brewer is a senior lecturer in English and drama at Loughborough University, UK. She is the author of Staging Whiteness (2005) and coeditor of Modern and Contemporary Black British Drama (2015) and has published essays on literature and film adaptation. Her teaching and research interests are modern and contemporary American and English literature and drama, with a particular focus on the representation of identity.

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.

M. Tyler Sasser

Instructor of English
University of Alabama

M. Tyler Sasser recently completed his PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he studied the intersections of early modern boyhood, Shakespeare, and adaptations of Shakespeare, especially in children’s literature. His research appears or is forthcoming in Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, the Shakespeare Newsletter, Children’s Literature in Education, Children’s Literature, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. His essay on Hamlet and contemporary fiction for boys is slated to appear in the forthcoming volume Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction. He is an instructor of English at the University of Alabama.

2016 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover