W. B. Worthen

B.A., University of Massachusetts (1977); Ph.D., Princeton University (1981). W. B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre (Barnard), is the author of several books, including  The Idea of the Actor  (Princeton University Press, 1984),  Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater  (Univ. of California Press, 1993),  Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance  (Cambridge University Press, 1997),  Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance  (Cambridge University Press, 2002),   Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama  (Cambridge University Press, 2006),  Drama: Between Poetry and Performance  (Blackwell-Wiley, 2010),  Shakespeare Performance Studies  (Cambridge University Press, 2014),  Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre  (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Theatre as Technology: Apparatus, Nostalgia, Obsolescence (Cambridge, 2025). He is the editor of the  Wadsworth Anthology of Drama , and of the award-winning  Modern Drama: Plays, Criticism, Theory ; he is the former editor of the professional journals Modern Drama   and Theatre Journal, and his articles have appeared in PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, TDR, Modern Drama, Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and elsewhere. Before coming to Barnard and Columbia, Professor Worthen taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Berkeley, and at the University of Michigan, as well as being a founding faculty member of the International Centre for Advanced Theatre Studies sponsored by the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has held grants from a number of foundations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gugenheim Foundation; most recently, he is a Fellow of the "Interweaving Performance Cultures" International Research Center, Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He teaches a wide range of courses in dramatic literature and performance theory, and is currently chair of the Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance.