Biography:
I love to teach and write about literature and theatre from Shakespeare to playwrights today. I’m the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project and a frequent guest lecturer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2016, I received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities.
My articles on Shakespeare and contemporary culture—from Shakespeare’s language, novel adaptations, and the history of history plays to blackface in Mary Poppins, the queer origins of West Side Story, and Hamilton in Puerto Rico—have appeared recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. My pandemic spoof, "What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague," was made into a short film by PBS.
I received my B.A. in History from Yale and my Ph.D. in English from Harvard, where I helped to edit the Norton edition of Shakespeare's complete works.
My wife and I met in a fifth-grade production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. We live with our two children and a puppy in Portland, our hometown.