Institute Faculty

Co-Directors

Dr. Deborah Uman

Deborah Uman is Professor of English and Dean of the Telitha E. Lindquist College of Arts & Humanities at Weber State University.  Noticing that her own kids and her students loved YA lit and often hated Shakespeare, she started integrating adaptations into her Shakespeare courses and encouraging her students to create their own adaptations as well. With co-director Jennifer Flaherty, she is editing the forthcoming book, Liberating Shakespeare: Adaptation and Empowerment for Young Adult Audience.
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Dr. Jennifer Flaherty

Jennifer Flaherty is an Associate Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Georgia College. She co-edited The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play (Bloomsbury Arden, 2021) with Heather C. Easterling. Her research emphasizes adaptation, global Shakespeare, and girlhood, and her publications include chapters in the volumes Shakespeare and Millennial Fiction (Cambridge), Shakespeare and Geek Culture (Bloomsbury Arden), and Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge). She has also published in journals such as Borrowers and Lenders, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Comparative Drama, and Shakespeare Bulletin. With co-director Deborah Uman, she is editing the forthcoming book, Liberating Shakespeare and Empowering Young Adult Audiences.

Technology Expert

​Dr. Scott O'Neil

Scott O'Neil is an Assistant Professor of English at Arkansas Tech University, where he teaches Shakespeare, film, and the English Education Methods course. In addition to being a Shakespeare scholar and an advocate for classroom technology, he is also an award-winning curriculum writer from his years as a high school teacher in Harford County Maryland. Whether he's writing about Shakespeare, performing Shakespeare, or using technology to teach Shakespeare, he's always excited to find something new about these 400+ year old plays (current favorites include the Simpsons  Comics Shakespeare issue, the Deadpool Shakespeare issue, and the Romeo and Juliet anime series).

K-12 Expert

Mark Miazga

Mark Miazga has been teaching high school English and coaching Varsity Baseball at Baltimore City College High School, the 3rd oldest public school in the country, for 21 years. A National-Board Certified teacher and the 2014 recipient of the Milken Educator Award for Maryland, Mr. Miazga also works as an adjunct professor in the Urban Teachers Masters program at Johns Hopkins University. He recently co-wrote the Folger Guide to Teaching Macbeth, to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2023.

Visiting Scholars

Dr. Ariane M. Balizet

Ariane M. Balizet is the author of Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies (Routledge, 2019), which applies the interdisciplinary field of Girls’ Studies to adaptations of Shakespeare in film, television, young adult literature, and web series. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s afterlives, and Girls’ Studies, she has taught workshops on these topics for secondary educators as part of AP summer institute sessions and Humanities Texas professional development programs.

​Dr. Vanessa I. Corredera

Vanessa I. Corredera’s research and pedagogy focuses on the intersections of race, adaptation/appropriation, popular culture, and performance. Her research has appeared in leading journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, and Borrowers and Lender, and her monograph, “Speak of Me As I Am”: Othello in Post-Racial America, is forthcoming in 2022 with Edinburgh University Press. She has led public-facing  talks and workshops on Shakespeare and race (including pedagogy) for a number of institutions, including The Globe, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Lancaster University, and Iowa State University.

Dr. Alexa Alice Joubin

Alexa Alice Joubin teaches critical race, gender, film, and Shakespeare studies in the Departments of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she serves as founding Co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute. Inclusive social justice is a key component of her publications and teaching. 

Dr. Douglas M. Lanier

Douglas Lanier is widely recognized as a pioneer in the study of modern appropriations of Shakespeare in all media. His book, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002), established the basic parameters of one of the liveliest fields in Shakespeare studies today. He followed up this work with an annotated catalogue of more than 900 Shakespeare spinoff films for Shakespeares after Shakespeare, ed. Richard Burt (Greenwood Press, 2005), a series of essays on Shakespearean appropriations of specific plays for the Sourcebooks Shakespeare editions, and contributions to The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. He has published widely on Renaissance authors (Shakespeare, Milton, Marston, Jonson) as well as on adaptation of Shakespeare worldwide in more than sixty articles in journals and collections, and he has recently completed two books, an edition of Timon of Athens for the New Kittredge series, and a monograph on The Merchant of Venice for the Arden Language & Writing Series.

Dr. Jesus Montaño

Jesus Montaño is Associate Professor of English at Hope College. Latinx YA ❤️  Shakespeare: while the premise is straightforward, if a bit of a surprise given Shakespeare's role in assimilation and deficit thinking, the promise of such an engagement is that Shakespearean YA adaptations authored by writers of color have the potential to destabilize racism and other forms of oppression in which young readers may find themselves. This places Shakespeare as the chief engineer of a project meant to overthrow the injustices of the world. His connection to this project emanates from such possibilities, that literary transfiguration leads to societal transformation.