Koerner Fellow Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Theater and Professor Emeritus of English, was honored at an interdisciplinary symposium at Northwestern University and The University of Chicago on April 12 and 13. The symposium, which gathered scholars, writers, and performers whom Professor Roach advised over the past thirty years in the areas of theatre studies, performance studies, African American Studies, American Studies, English literature, and other fields, aimed to “look back while moving forward” and included panel discussions, short papers, personal anecdotes, and a performance by those whose work was directly shaped by Professor Roach’s advising.
The symposium’s organizing committee writes, “Performance as we are told, is ephemeral, but Joe has always been more interested in how it endures—passed down through successive generations, bubbling up through deep time, going dormant and then roaring back to life. So a performance—much like the career of a prolific scholar, teacher, and mentor—never really says goodbye or The End. Instead, it leaves off with a promise: more soon…”
Professor Roach earned his B.A. (majoring in Theatre and English) from the University of Kansas (1969), his M.A. in Early Modern Drama from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1970), and his Ph.D. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University (1973). He chaired the Department of Theatre at Sweet Briar College, the Performing Arts Department (Drama and Dance) at Washington University in St. Louis, the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, and the Theater Program at Yale and served on the faculties of Tulane University and SUNY-Albany. With Linda Walsh Jenkins, he co-founded and served as the first Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), and It (2007); editor of Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009; and co-editor of Critical Theory and Performance (1992; rev.ed. 2007), The Very Thought of Herbert Blau (2018), and A Cultural History of Hair in the Age of Enlightenment, Vol. 4 (2018). He has contributed to many edited collections and journals, including The Global Eighteenth Century, The First Actresses, Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, The Rise of Performance Studies, Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, African-American Performance and Theater History, The Ends of Performance, Cambridge History of American Theatre, Interpreting the Theatrical Past; PMLA, MLQ, Shakespeare Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, TDR, Performance Research, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, EighteenthCentury Studies, and J19. His scholarship has been recognized by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a Lifetime Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research, a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Joe E. Calloway Prize in Drama and Theatre, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre, the Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the University of Warwick (UK). His mentorship has been recognized by the Oscar Brockett Award for Outstanding Teaching from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. He founded the World Performance Project and Interdisciplinary Performance Studies at Yale (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and served as President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. A founding member of the Creede Repertory Theatre (1966), he has directed over fifty plays, operas, and musicals, most recently a triptych of Shakespearean adaptations for Yale College Theater Studies: PsychoHamlet (2006), Henry 5.1 (2010), and Richard Ill, Straight (2013).