Samuel Yates, Ph.D., is a deaf artist and researcher who examines the aesthetics of disability and performance. Samuel is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Directing in the School of Theatre and Dance at Millikin University. He received his doctorate in English from The George Washington University, where his research earned the American Society for Theatre Research’s Helen Krich-Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship. He completed an M.Phil in Theatre and Performance Studies from Trinity College Dublin as a George J. Mitchell Scholar and a B.A. from Centre College. Samuel holds a Humanity in Action Senior Fellowship for his work on performance and body politics, and has artistically collaborated with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, The Samuel Beckett Centre, and Gala Hispanic Theatre. His current project, Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability and the American Musical investigates disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in Broadway musicals by asking how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transform theatrical performance. Recent and forthcoming publications can be found in Music Theatre Today, Vol. 4, Studies in Musical Theatre, The Matter of Disability (U Michigan), and A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury).
Justin P. Shaw is an Assistant Professor of English at Clark University where he teaches and researches Shakespeare and early modern English literature. He is working on his first monograph which examines race and disability in early modern literature. Committed to both public and traditional scholarship, his work appears in the peer-reviewed journal Early Theatre, in the forthcoming critical volume, White People in Shakespeare, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, and has been discussed on NPR and podcasts such as A Bit Lit. He has helped to design exhibits for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University such as, Desire & Consumption: The New World in the Age of Shakespeare, consulted on the exhibit First Folio: The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare, and is lead developer for the digital humanities project, Shakespeare and the Players (Shakespeare [dot] emory [dot] edu)
Katherine Schaap Williams is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. Her work on Shakespeare and early modern drama, disability studies, and performance theory has been published or is forthcoming in ELH, English Studies, Disability Studies Quarterly, Early Theatre, Shakespeare Bulletin, and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, as well as several edited volumes. She edited Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s 1605 play Eastward Ho for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020), and her monograph, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater, was published by Cornell University Press in 2021.