Member News – Bess Rowen

Bess Rowen, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University, recently returned from leading a summer study abroad program for graduate students in Ireland. The course, called the Irish Summer Studio, involved leading students through a week of archival research in Galway and then two weeks of coursework at The Lir Academy in Dublin, including her own course on Irish Theatre and Nationalism. Additionally, she got to take students to shows at the historic Abbey and Gate theaters and on excursions to the Cliffs of Moher, Glendalough, and other exciting places. This course is primarily composed of Villanova students, but is open to other MA and PhD students, too! In addition to this wonderful trip, she has had a busy summer of publications, including an interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about Eugene O’Neill’s influence on him (“Something Very Formal and Weird: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Eugene O’Neill” in The Eugene O’Neill Review), a chapter on María Irene Fornés and Paula Vogel in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities, an article about staging teenage girlhood in Theatre Survey (“An Endless Capacity for Dissembling: Representing Teenage Girls on the American Stage from The Children’s Hour Through If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka“), and a Gale Cengage educational resource on The Glass Menagerie.