Introductions:
- Thomas W. Keefe, University of Dallas President
- Scott Crider, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Constantin College
Keynote: "Shakespeare's Language - As You Like It" with Ralph Alan Cohen
About Ralph Alan Cohen:
Ralph Alan Cohen is Co-Founder and Director of Mission at the American Shakespeare
Center and Gonder Professor of Shakespeare and Performance and founder of the Master
of Letters and Fine Arts program at Mary Baldwin College where he is also Gonder Professor
of English. Among his many initiatives, Cohen also authored ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare.
Ralph Alan Cohen was project director for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse
and he has directed 30 productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries,
including America’s first professional production of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
He also directed the first revival of Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants and co-edited the play for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Thomas Middleton.
He twice edited special teaching issues of the Shakespeare Quarterly and has published
articles on teaching Shakespeare as well as on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Elizabethan
staging. He founded the Studies Abroad program at James Madison University, where
he won Virginia’s award for outstanding faculty. He has frequently directed summer
institutes on Shakespeare and staging sponsored by the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
In 2001, he established the Blackfriars Conference, a bi-annual week-long celebration
of early modern drama in performance. In 2008, he won the Commonwealth Governor’s
Arts Award. In 2009, he was the Theo Crosby Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
In 2013, he was awarded the Folger Shakespeare Library's prestigious Shakespeare Steward
Award.
He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his doctorate at Duke
University.
