A Renaissance Masque: Queens, “Crones,” and The Power of Women

Clare McManus

PROFESSOR OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE AND THEATERE, AND DIRECTOR OF THE RESEARCH CENTRE FOR INCLUSIVE HUMANITIES, UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON, LONDON

She publishes widely on Shakespearean women’s performance, has edited Shakespeare, Fletcher and Shirley, and collaborates with two international research groups: Theatre Without Borders investigates transnational early modern theatre; Engendering the Stage uses archival and performance research to investigate the gendering of early modern performance. She is currently co-editing Marston’s The Fawn (forthcoming with OUP), editing Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen for Arden 4, and completing a monograph on the effects of women’s performance on the Shakespearean stage. 

Cameron Anderson

SCENIC DESIGNER

Cameron Anderson is an internationally acclaimed American scenic designer, who during her twenty-year career has designed extensively at the world’s leading theatre and opera companies. Recent credits include work for Glimmerglass Opera, The Seattle Opera, The Manhattan Theater Club, Playwrights Horizons, The Roundabout, and The Huntington Theatre.  She has designed many world premieres, including ones at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, The Vancouver Opera, and the Kilden Performing Arts Center in Norway. Previously with NYU Florence, Cameron designed scenery and projections for the newly discovered pastoral play Clorilli, directed by Eric Nicholson. Cameron is an Associate Professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University.

Matteo Duni

NYU FACULTY

Matteo Duni has devoted several decades to the study of the witch-hunt in Renaissance and Reformation Europe. His research focuses on witchcraft and folklore, the role of the Inquisition, and the debate on the reality of witchcraft between witch-hunters and skeptics. He teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance history and on the history of the witch-hunt at Syracuse University’s and New York University’s centers in Florence. His publications include Tra religione e magia. Storia del prete Modenese Guglielmo Campana (Firenze, 1999), Under the Devil’s Spell. Witches, Sorcerers and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy (Firenze, 2007). He has edited the proceedings of the conference Prescritto e Proscritto: Religione e società nell’Italia moderna (Roma, 2015) and a special issue of the journal Genesis. Rivista della Società Italiana delle Storiche(XIX, 1 – 2020: Immaginare la stregoneria, with Matteo Al Kalak, Xenia von Tippelskirch). He has authored entries in major reference works such as the Encyclopedia of Witchcraft (Santa Barbara, 2006) and the Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione (Pisa, 2011) as well as many articles in scholarly journals.

Gloria Giordano

DANCER, CHOREOGRAPHER, DANCE HISTORIAN, AND SPECIALIST IN THE ITALIAN AND FRENCHE STYLE DANCE

Dancer, choreographer, dance historian, and a specialist in the Italian and French style of dance, 15th to 18th centuries.  Lecturer in Dance Theory at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza, Rome. PhD, Université de Tours (France), with a thesis on 17th-18th century dance in Rome (2022). Editor of the facsimile publication of the manuscript Balletti, by Gaetano Grossatesta (Venice, 1726), for la Libreria Musicale Italiana (L.I.M., with cd rom, 2005) and, with Alessandro Pontremoli, of the volume by Barbara Sparti, Dance, Dancers and Dance-Masters in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (2015). www.gloriagiordano.it

Sarah Mead

PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE OF MUSIC, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

Sarah Mead is a Professor of the Practice of Music at Brandeis University where she has directed period ensembles and taught music history since 1982, and has chaired the interdepartmental program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Overseas she has performed and taught in Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and is a sought-after lecturer and ensemble-coach in the US, where she is a founding member and music director of Nota Bene Viol Consort, whose CD of the Quattordeci Sonetti Spirituali of Pietro Vinci was released in 2020.

Eric Nicholson

Eric Nicholson teaches literature and theatre courses at NYU Florence, and Syracuse University Florence. An active member of the international research collaborative Theater Without Borders, with Robert Henke he has edited Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2014). With Pamela Allen Brown and Julie D. Campbell he has translated and edited Isabella Andreini’s Fragmenti di alcune scritture…, as Lovers’ Debates for the Stage (ITER Press: The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, 2022). Since 2018, he has also published several articles in Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies. In Florence and elsewhere, Eric has directed and performed in plays by Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière, and others, among them Clorilli, a Pastoral Drama by Leonora Bernardi of Lucca, in its premiere modern production (NYU Florence Villa La Pietra, Spring 2018).

Stephen Orgel

J. E. REYNOLDS PROFESSOR IN THE HUMANITIES, EMERITUS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Stephen Orgel is the J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is the author of The Idea of the Book (Oxford, 2022), The Reader in the Book  (Oxford, 2015), Spectacular Performances (Manchester, 2011), Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2003), and The Authentic Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002). Recent books include Wit’s Treasury and The Invention of Shakespeare  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 and 2022). The Globe in Print is in the press. He is the general editor of the New Pelican Shakespeare, and has edited The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in the Oxford Shakespeare

Ramie Targoff

JEHUDA REINHARZ PROFESSOR OF THE HUMANITIES, CO-CHAIR OF ITALIAN STUDIES, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

Ramie Targoff is the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities and Co-Chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of multiple books on Italian and English Renaissance literature and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her new book, Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in 2024.

Gaia Varon

NYU FLORENCE LECTURER AND IULM UNIVERSITY, MILAN

A musicologist who loves to spread love for music, Gaia Varon is University Lecturer at NYU Florence and IULM University in Milan. She is also author and presenter of music programmes for Rai Radio3 (among which all the live broadcasts from Milan Teatro alla Scala), Swiss Radio Rete 2 and television music channels. She has published articles and book chapters on opera and cinema in Italian cultural history, operatic and symphonic music on screen, classical music recording style and technique, music in avant-garde short films, classical music in the Italian mediascape. 

Susanne Wofford

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND INDIVIDUALIZED STUDY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Susanne Wofford is Professor of English and Individualized Study at NYU, and previously was Dean of NYU’s Gallatin School.  A former president of the Shakespeare Association of America, she is cofounder of the Theater Without Borders International Research Collaborative. She writes on classical and Renaissance epic and drama, and her recent work includes articles on transnational early modern plays (Shakespeare with Spanish and Italian theater); and on Shakespeare and Ancient Greek and Roman plays, including an essay on Much Ado About Nothing and Euripides’ Alcestis. Most recently she co-edited a special section of Renaissance Drama on Cross-dressing, contributing an essay on Ana Caro (Spanish woman playwright).