School of Arts & Humanities Faculty

Kevin Crawford
Assistant Professor of English and Theatre

Academic Degrees
B.A., M.A. Florida Atlantic University
Ph.D., University of Alabama

Teaching and Scholarly Interests:
Shakespeare and his contemporaries (especially Marlowe and Middleton),
theatre historiography, performance criticism, film.

An actor as well as a teacher and scholar, Dr. Crawford appeared as Brutus (right)
in Julius Caesar at the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival.

Contact Information:
KSC@Reinhardt.edu
770-720-5937

Career Biography:

Kevin Crawford joined the Reinhardt faculty in August 2007. He holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance Drama from the Hudson Strode Program for Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. His dissertation, "'Tis ten to one this play will never please": Academic Performance Criticism and Conditional Shakespeare, investigates performed Shakespeare in three venues virtually ignored by the academic "Shakespeare Industry": small regional festivals, major regional festivals, and university theatre departments. Dr. Crawford's publications have addressed racism, masculinity, sexual deviance, and the grotesque in Renaissance drama; his reviews of books and performances have appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin and Shakespeare Yearbook. He has presented his work at the annual conferences of the Shakespeare Association of America, the Group for Early Modern Culture Studies, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

Dr. Crawford is also Associate Artistic Director/Actor and Founding Company Member of the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, where he has directed and performed since its incorporation in 1990. There, he has played Macbeth, Hamlet, Pericles, Brutus, Falstaff, Othello, Mercutio, Petruchio, Benedick, Leontes, and many other roles in early modern drama (see http://www.pbshakespeare.org/). He is a produced playwright as well: his original adaptation of Medea first premiered at the Northstage Theatre Company in 1998 and was produced by Palm Beach Atlantic University with a revised and updated script in November 2007.

Long an advocate for Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Middleton, Dr. Crawford is Editor of the "Middleton in Performance" branch of the online edition of Oxford University Press's Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. His 1996 production of Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy is cited in the print edition as one of the few late-twentieth-century productions of the play that gave it a new lease on life after nearly four hundred years of neglect, and in 2001 he starred in three staged readings for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival as part of its spring Thomas Middleton Season and Symposium: Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy (dir. Andrew Hartley), Ricardo in The Widow (Modern World Premiere, dir. Gary Taylor), and Penitent Brothel in A Mad World, My Masters (dir. Bob Hornback).

Recent Publications

"Race, Linens, and Essences [Almost] Not Seen." Shakespeare Bulletin 26.1
(2008).

"The Sun Looking With a Southward Eye Upon Us: Shakespeare in South Florida." 
Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. 1.1
(2005).

"'All his intents are contrary to man': Softened Masculinity and Staging in Thomas
Middleton's The Lady's Tragedy." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England
16 (2003).

"A 'black, black, black man': Aaron's Represented Blackness on Stage and
Screen." Journal X: A Biannual Journal in Culture and Criticism 7 (2003).

Reviews

"Julie Hankey's Shakespeare in Production: Othello." Shakespeare Yearbook
XVIII (2008).