California Faculty 2024
Amy Rodgers, On-site director. AB, Columbia University; PhD, University of Michigan. Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre and Dean for the Senior Class, Mount Holyoke College.
Amy Rodgers is Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on early modern literature and culture, audience and popular culture studies, theories of adaptation, and dance studies. Among her publications are essays on the Renaissance court masque, Hindi-language cinema director Vishal Bhardwaj, Shakespeare’s history plays’ influence on HBO’s Game of Thrones, and performance genealogies that cross different communicative forms, particularly theater and dance. Her first monograph, A Monster With a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press in February of 2018. She is a co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project, and, before commencing her academic career, danced with the Washington, Atlanta, and Joffrey ballet companies.
Damián Baca, BA, West Texas A&M University; MA, Northern Arizona University; PhD, Syracuse University. Associate Professor of Mexican American Studies, University of Arizona.
Damián Baca is Associate Professor of English and Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. He is author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (2008), and co-editor of Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (2010), Rhetorics of Difference (2018), and Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions (2019). He studies how technologies of writing can help heal colonial wounds and create global realities no longer determined by imperial, Eurocentric horizons.
Michael Cadden, BA, Yale College; BA, University of Bristol; DFA, Yale School of Drama. Former Chair, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University.
Michael Cadden, former Chair of Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts, is in his 40th year of teaching theater at the university. Since 1981, he’s taught most summers at Bread Loaf, at its campuses in Vermont, Oxford, Santa Fe, Asheville, Juneau – and now California. A winner of Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, he has offered courses on Modern and Contemporary Theater, Dramaturgy, Comedy, the history of theatrical directing, Shakespeare in Performance, and Ancient Greek Drama in Performance.
Dennis Denisoff, BA, Simon Fraser University; MA, PhD, McGill University. McFarlin Chair of English and Film, University of Tulsa.
Dennis Denisoff works in environmental humanities, queer studies, and decadence. His two current projects iare a study of the early tentacles of glocal environmentalism and a set of articles on trans-speciesism and weird fiction. He is the author of four monographs, three books of creative writing, seven edited works, and four co-edited works. Recent publications include Decadent Ecology: Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (Cambridge University Press 2022) and guest-edited special journal issues on “Global Decadence” (Feminist Modernist Studies, 2021) and “Scales of Decadence” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2021). He is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Literature and the Environment (Cambridge University Press 2024).
Ruth Forman, BA, University of California at Berkeley; MFA, University of Southern California. VONA/Voices Writing Workshop.
Ruth Forman is the author of poetry collections Prayers Like Shoes, Renaissance, We Are the Young Magicians, and children’s book, Young Cornrows Callin Out the Moon. She’s received the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, The Durfee Artist Fellowship, the NCTE Notable Book Award, and recognition by The ALA. Ruth is a former teacher of creative writing with the University of Southern California and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley as well as a thirteen-year faculty member with the VONA/Voices program. You can learn more about her at www.ruthforman.com.
Valerie Traub, BA, University of California, Santa Cruz; MA, PhD, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan.