[Joyce Green MacDonald]

Greetings, everyone. I’ve been nominated as a candidate for the Adaptation Studies executive committee, and wanted to introduce myself to all members.

I teach Shakespeare and other early modern topics at the University of Kentucky. My work on race in Shakespeare studies has largely focused on adaptation; my most recent book is Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World (Palgrave, 202o). I have written about how texts and literary modes are transmuted over time, in essays on pastoral in seventeenth-century New England, on the whitening of Aphra Behn’s heroine Imoinda in eighteenth-century adaptations of Oroonoko, and on blackface versions of Macbeth and <i>Othello. </i>My work in progress includes a discussion of how black women appear and reappear in poems from and about the eighteenth-century British Caribbean, and on Caroline Randall Williams’ poetry collection Lucy Negro, Redux as a response to what is missing from the early modern literary record of black women’s cultural presence. I’m interested in how adaptation can operate as a liberatory creative response to cultural erasure, and I look forward to helping our group gain its organizational footing within the MLA.

[Julie Grossman]

Excited about your nomination, Joyce–and thank you for your interest in expanding adaptation studies within the MLA!  All best wishes, Julie Grossman

[Katherine Gillen]

Hi everyone! I’m also candidate for the Adaptation Forum’s executive committee, so I wanted to introduce myself.  I’m honored to have been nominated alongside Joyce, whose work I greatly admire!

I teach Shakespeare, early modern lit, and drama at Texas A&M University–San Antonio, and I emphasize adaptation/appropriation throughout these courses. My scholarship explores early modern strategies of textual appropriation as well as more recent Shakespeare adaptations and appropriations, with specific attention to dynamics of race, gender, and colonialism.

I’m currently working on my second monograph, called Race, Rome, and Early Modern Drama: The Whitening of England and the Classical World, which addresses how English playwrights appropriated classical texts as part of an effort to articulate and promote English whiteness. In addition to this project, I am a co-founder of the Borderlands Shakespeare Collective, an initiative that seeks to archive, curate, and circulate works Shakespeare adaptation in and around the US-Mexico Borderlands. As part of this Collective, I am co-editing an anthology of Borderlands Shakespeare plays. I’ve also published on Shakespeare appropriation, with an emphasis on Latinx Shakespeare, in venues such as Borrowers and Lenders (forthcoming), The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, and The Sundial.

I have been a regular participant in MLA conventions, and I look forward to contributing to this newly formed Adaptation forum. There is so much exciting work happening in this field, and I would love to help highlight it and create opportunities for our members!

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Katherine Gillen.

[Julie Grossman]

Congrats on your nomination, Katherine!  I am so happy to learn about your interesting work, and very much look forward to meeting (in whatever form) before too long!  All best wishes, Julie Grossman

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