SAS Dean Rebecca Bushnell to Be President of Shakespeare Association
Rebecca Bushnell, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor, and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, has been elected the vice-president of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). She will become president of the association next year. The SAA is a non-profit academic organization devoted to the study of William Shakespeare and his plays and poems, the cultural and theatrical milieu in which he lived and worked, and the various roles he has played in both Anglo-American and world culture ever since.
Bushnell is a scholar of early modern English literature, culture, and history, as well as an expert on the literary genre of tragedy. Her books include Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens, A Companion to Tragedy, and Tragedy: A Short Introduction. She has received grant support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is also a recipient of the University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
Bushnell has served as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor since January 2005, and on the Penn faculty since 1982. From 1998 to 2003, she served as associate dean for arts and letters in the School of Arts and Sciences, overseeing faculty affairs, budgets, and strategic planning for humanities departments, centers, and programs. As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2004, she led Penn’s undergraduate programs in the liberal arts. She is a former chair of the graduate group in English and from 1993 to 1994 directed the University-wide Presidential Commission on Strengthening the Community.
Bushnell holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in English literature from Bryn Mawr, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton.
The SAA holds annual meetings in different North American cities so that its members can exchange ideas and discuss strategies for reading, teaching, researching, and writing about Shakespeare's works and their many contexts. Sessions at these conferences include formal papers, seminars, workshops, film screenings, and theatrical performances.
