Vermont Faculty 2025

Barbara Black, AB Bryn Mawr College; MA, PhD, University of Virginia. Professor, Tisch Chair in the Arts and Letters, Skidmore College.

Barbara Black is Professor of English and Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, where she has received the Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of On Exhibit (Virginia 2000), A Room of His Own (Ohio 2012), and Hotel London (Ohio State 2019), and a co-editor of Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (Broadview 2020). Black’s essays have appeared in such venues as Victorian Poetry, Dickens Studies Annual, and Salmagundi. She has served on the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies board and as Book Review Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She currently serves on the Editorial Advisory Committee for PMLA. 

Angela Brazil, BA, California State University at Chico; MFA, University of Iowa. Associate Professor of the Practice, Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA Programs in Acting and Directing; Resident Acting Company Member, Trinity Repertory Company. 

Angela Brazil assumed the Directorship of Brown/ Trinity Rep’s MFA Programs in Acting and Directing this year. She continues to teach in the program’s Voice and Speech department. She has been a member of Trinity Rep’s resident acting company since 2000, and co-directed the company’s production of A Christmas Carol this year with her husband and fellow company member Stephen Thorne (a longtime member of the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble). This year’s production was the highest-grossing production in the theater’s 53-year history. She has performed in regional theaters around the country, recorded numerous audiobooks, and works in Rhode Island-area public and private schools as a teaching artist.

Susan Choi, BA Yale, MFA Cornell. Professor, Johns Hopkins University.

Susan Choi is the author most recently of Flashlight (FSG, June 2025). Her previous novels are The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, My Education, and Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. She has also been recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lamba Literary award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn.

Dare Clubb, BA, Amherst College; MFA, DFA, Yale School of Drama. 

Dare Clubb taught playwriting, dramatic literature, and theory at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop of the University of Iowa for twenty-five years. He has taught at Princeton University, Barnard College, the New School for Social Research, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was playwright-in-residence at the Juilliard School from 1985-87. His plays have been performed at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Juilliard, and the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. His original play Oedipus received an OBIE award in 1999. He received the University of Iowa Collegiate Teaching Award in 2007 and was a University of Iowa Faculty Scholar from 2009 to 2012.

Tyler Curtain, BSc, University of Colorado at Boulder; PhD, Johns Hopkins University. Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Stephen Donadio, BA, Brandeis University; MA, PhD, Columbia University. John Hamilton Fulton Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Director Emeritus of the Program in Literary Studies, Middlebury College.

Stephen Donadio received his B.A. degree from Brandeis University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and completed his doctorate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses before moving to Middlebury College. A recipient of NEH and Rockefeller fellowships, he is longtime member of the Bread Loaf faculty, and served as editor of the New England Review for twenty years. At Middlebury he is currently the Fulton Professor of Humanities and Director of the Program in Literary Studies. He has written on Nietzsche and Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walker Percy, Joseph McElroy, and Thomas Pynchon, among others, as well as modern poets including John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and A.R.Ammons. At present his principal research interests are centered on a range of texts that challenge some established critical assumptions regarding the boundaries seen as separating certain literary categories, periods, and movements.

Lars Engle, AB, Harvard College; MA, Cambridge University; PhD, Yale University. Roxana McFarlin Chapman Chair in English, University of Tulsa.

Lars Engle has taught at Tulsa since 1988 and at Bread Loaf since 1999. He’s the author of books on Renaissance drama and Shakespeare (most recently Studying Shakespeare’s Contemporaries), coeditor of a standard collection of Renaissance dramas, coeditor of several essay collections (most recently Shakespeare and Montaigne) and author of many articles and chapters.

Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, the Public Theater at Astor Place; Professor of Dramatic Writing, Arts, and Public Policy at New York University.

Jonathan Fried, BA, Brown University; MFA University of California, San Diego. 

Jonathan Fried has been a professional actor since 1986, performing in New York, nationally and internationally. He began his association wiht BLSE in 1987 as a member of the Acting Ensemble and has taught on the Sante Fe and Monterey campuses.

Shalom Goldman, BA, New York University; MA, Columbia University; PhD, New York University. Pardon Tillinghast Professor of Religion, Middlebury College.

Rochelle Johnson, BA, Bates College; MA, PhD, Claremont Graduate University. Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Environmental Studies, The College of Idaho. 

Rochelle L. Johnson (she/her) is Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Environmental Studies at the College of Idaho. Recognized by the Carnegie Foundation for her teaching, Rochelle has earned research awards from the American Antiquarian Society, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Idaho Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), among other organizations. Her writings on 19th-century landscape aesthetics, place-based pedagogy, and natural history appear in various journals and anthologies, as does her creative nonfiction on birds, climate grief, and disability. The author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienation, she co-edited five other books, including Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: New Essays on an American Icon. Rochelle is past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and The Thoreau Society. See more: rochellejohnsonwriter.com.

Rebecca Makkai, BA, Washington and Lee University; MA, Middlebury College. MFA Faculty at Bennington College and Northwestern University; Artistic Director, Story Studio Chicago. Recipient of the 2025 Robert Frost Chair of Literature, BLSE. 

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the 2023’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Borrower, and The Hundred-Year House, and the story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ 100 Books of the 21st Century, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, Bennington College, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English; and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.

Kate Marshall, BA, University of California, Davis; MA, PhD, University of California, Los Angeles. Associate Dean of Research and Strategic Initiatives, Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and Professor of English, University of Notre Dame.

Kate Marshall is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), Novels by Aliens (2023) and articles on fabulism, weird fiction, media theory, and technology. She was the 2016-2017 Founders’ Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She co-edits the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press, and is currently working on a compact theory of the contemporary novella.

Brian McEleney, BA, Trinity College; MFA, Yale School of Drama. Founding Director of the Brown University/Trinity MFA Programs; Associate Director and Acting Company Member, Trinity Repertory Company. 

Brian is Director of the Theatre Program at the Bread Loaf School of English. Since 1984 he has performed in over two dozen Bread Loaf productions, including Twelfth Night, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Richard II, Measure for Measure, Uncle Vanya, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Merchant of Venice. He has directed Bread Loaf productions of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blues for Mister Charlie, U.S.A., Othello, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Johnny Eyre, and The Tempest. As a long-time member of the Trinity Rep Acting Company, he has played over 75 roles, including King Lear, Richard II, Richard III, Cassius, and Malvolio. He has also directed over 25 productions, including Hamlet, Our Town, All the King’s Men, A Raisin in the Sun, The Grapes of Wrath, House and Garden, Twelfth Night, and Ivanov.

Cruz Medina, BA, University of California, Santa Barbara; MFA/MA, Chapman University; PhD, University of Arizona. Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, Santa Clara University.

Cruz Medina is associate professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Santa Clara University. Cruz served as co-chair of the NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus from 2017-2021. He has been Bread Loaf School of English faculty since 2016 and was awarded the M. Ruth Marino chair in 2017 for teaching innovation. His monograph Reclaiming Poch@ Pop: Examining the Rhetoric of Cultural Deficiency was published in 2015 by Palgrave. His current research applies decolonial methods and CRT to a volunteer English program with predominantly Indigenous Guatemalan students.

Ian Newman, BA, MA, University of Cambridge; PhD, University of California, Los Angeles. Associate Professor of English, University of Notre Dame.

Ian Newman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and a fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish studies. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature and culture. He is the author of The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), and (with David O’Shaughnessy) Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London (Liverpool University Press, 2022). He is also responsible for a digital project tracing the meeting places of the London Corresponding Society, and a digital edition of the manuscript ballad collection of Francis Place, was a founding editor of the Keats Letters Project, and is board member of the 19th-century Song Club.

January O’Neill, MFA New York University; BA Old Dominion University. Associate Professor, Salem State University.

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road was a finalist for the 2024 New England Book Award. From 2012-2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2025 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

Mark Rasmussen, BA, MA, Harvard University; PhD, Johns Hopkins University. Charles J. Luellen Professor of English Emeritus, Centre College.

Mark Rasmussen received a B.A. and M.A. from Harvard and an M.A. and PhD from Johns Hopkins. From 1989 to 2024 he taught at Centre College, offering courses in medieval and early modern literature (including Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare), literary theory, history of the English language, Bob Dylan, museum studies, and first-year humanities. He has published essays on a range of topics in his fields and has edited two landmark collections: Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), which helped refresh attention to questions of form in English Renaissance literature, and Life in Words (2014), the collected essays of the distinguished medievalist, Jill Mann. His current project is a study of poetic complaint from classical antiquity to the Renaissance.

Michelle Bachelor Robinson, BA, Cameron University; MA, PhD, University of Louisville. Director of Comprehensive Writing and English Faculty, Spelman College; Change Curriculum Coordinator, BLSE.

Dr. Michelle Bachelor Robinson is the Director of the Comprehensive Writing Program at Spelman College. Actively involved in community-engaged research and writing in historically Black spaces, her publications include co-editor of The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric, articles in Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition and Council of Writing Program Administration (CWPA), and the senior contributing author for OpenStax Writing Guide with Handbook. Dr. Robinson joined the Bread Loaf faculty in the summer of 2019, offering courses in rhetoric and writing practice and pedagogy.

James Chase Sanchez, BA, MA, University of Texas at Tyler; PhD, Texas Christian University. Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, Middlebury College.

James Chase Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Middlebury College. He recently published two books, a co-authored monograph titled Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods and a single-authored monograph titled Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy. The latter book draws upon his 2018 documentary, Man on Fire, which premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens and won an International Documentary Association Award. Sanchez is currently finishing production of two more documentaries: one titled North Putnam, which is a direct cinema approach to an incredible school district in rural Indiana (and is executive produced by famed author Dave Eggers). The other film, titled In Loco Parentis, investigates a decades-long fight to reconcile sexual abuse at two prestigious New England boarding schools. In Loco Parentis is represented by Submarine Entertainment, who have developed and sold six of the last twelve Academy Awards in Documentary.

Ben Steinfeld, BA, MFA, Brown University. Adjunct Professor and Artistic Associate at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University; Co-artistic Director, Fiasco Theater.

Ben’s working life blends acting, directing, teaching, writing, and music-making. He has appeared on stages from Broadway to London, and is a co-artistic director of the award-winning Fiasco Theater in NYC, best known for it’s celebrated productions of Cymbeline and Into the Woods, among many others since its founding in 2009. He teaches at Brown and NYU during the year.

Sam Swope, BA, Middlebury College; MA, University of Oxford. Founder and President, Academy for Teachers.

Sam Swope is president of the Academy for Teachers and dean emeritus of the Teacher Institute at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He’s the author of I Am a Pencil: A Teacher, His Kids, and Their World of Stories, The Araboolies of Liberty Street, The Krazees, Gotta Go! Gotta Go!, and Jack and the Seven Deadly Giants. 

David Bwire (Wandera), BEd, Moi University, Kenya; MA, MLitt, Middlebury College; PhD, The Ohio State University. Associate Professor of Special Education, Language and Literacy, The College of New Jersey.

David B. Wandera is an Associate Professor in the department of Special Education, Language and Literacy in the School of Education, at The College of New Jersey. His scholarship is located within the field of transcultural literacy studies. Originally from Kenya, he is a linguistic anthropologist who studies the changing nature of language and identity practices among youth in globalizing localities. His current project on decolonizing research traditions illustrates how the field of literacy research can benefit from cross-cultural epistemic collaborations.

Susanne Wofford, BA, Yale College; BPhil, Oxford University; PhD, Yale University. Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study and English, New York University.

Formerly the Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Susanne Wofford is Professor of English and Individualized Study at NYU. She has taught at Bread Loaf for many summers since 1989. A cofounder of the Theater Without Borders International Research Collaborative, her current work focuses on transnational European Early Modern Drama, looking both at Italian and French plays and novellas in relation to Shakespeare, but also at the ancient theater, and especially at the relation of Shakespeare and Roman Comedy, and Shakespeare and Euripides. She has served as President and Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America, and President and board member of the International Spenser Society. She is author of The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (1992); Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (co-edited with Jane Tylus and Margaret Beissinger,1999); Shakespeare: The Late Tragedies (ed.1995); and Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (ed. 1994). Recent work includes: “Hymen and the Gods on Stage in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Italian Pastoral,” in Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (2014); “Foreign Emotions in Twelfth Night,” in Theatre Crossing Borders: Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern Drama (2008);  “Foreign” in 21^st Century Approaches to Early Modern Theatricality (2013); “Globalization” in Shakespeare in our Time (2016); “Origin Stories of Fear and Tyranny: Blood and Dismemberment in Macbeth (with a Glance at the Oresteia)” in Comparative Drama (2017), a special issue ed. by Silvia Bigliazzi on The Tyrant’s Fear; and “Veiled Revenants and the Risks of Hospitality: Euripides’ Alcestis, the Renaissance novella, and Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing” in Rethinking  Shakespeare  Source  Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies, eds. Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter (Routledge 2018).

Bryan Wolf, BA, Rice University; MAR, Yale Divinity School; MA, PhD, Yale University. Jones Professor Emeritus in American Art and Culture, Stanford University; Former Visiting Professor, Yale University.

Bryan Wolf is the Jones Professor, Emeritus, Stanford University. He co-directed the Stanford University Arts Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort to expand the role of the arts in undergraduate and graduate education. His books include Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in American Art and Literature; Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing; and American Encounters, a co-authored textbook on American art. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has served as the Senior Visiting Scholar at the Terra Foundation Residency for American Art in Giverny, France. The Yale Daily News voted him one of the “Ten Best Teachers at Yale.” His current work centers on the way that artists like Philip Guston and Martin Puryear address issues surrounding the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement.

Tamsen Wolff, BA, Smith College; PhD, Columbia University. Associate Professor of English, Princeton University.

Tamsen Wolff specializes in modern and contemporary drama and performance, gender studies, voice, directing, and dramaturgy. Her book Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama reveals the complex role of heredity and hereditary theory in the emergence of modern American drama. She published her first novel, Juno’s Swans (Europa Editions), in 2018. She is currently working on a book entitled Ev’ry Syllable She Utters: Parsing the Voice in Musical Theater and a historical novel, This Is a New Country, based on nineteenth-century immigrant love letters. Wolff has worked professionally as a director and a dramaturg, and she is an Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework.