Symposium: Susan Glaspell Comes Home

The International Susan Glaspell Society

The purpose of the International Susan Glaspell Society is to promote the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer though the ongoing publication of high-quality scholarship and critical analyses of all her works, participation in national and international conferences, performances and public readings of her plays, and commitment to reprinting and teaching her plays, novels, and stories.

J. Ellen Gainor

Speaker

J. Ellen Gainor is Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts. A specialist in British and American drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and women's dramaturgy, she is the author of the award-winning studies Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender and Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture and Politics 1915-48. She is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Drama, co-editor of The Complete Plays of Susan Glaspell, and the editor of Githa Sowerby: Three Plays. She has also edited the influential essay collections Imperialism and Theatre and the co-edited Performing America: Culture Nationalism in American Theater. Her latest publications include the edited volume, Susan Glaspell in Context, and the co-edited Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory & Dramatic Criticism, which received the 2024 George Freedley Memorial Award Special Jury Prize from the Theatre Library Association. She is an elected fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. 

Emeline Jouve

Speaker

Emeline Jouve is Professor of American Theatre and Drama at Toulouse–Jean Jaurès University (France). Her research focuses on American avant-garde theatre. She is the author of Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion (University of Iowa Press, 2017), Performing Paradise: The Living Theatre in France (1968–2018) (Classiques Garnier, 2022; English translation, Routledge, 2026), and A Century of Theatrical Avant-Garde in New York (Deuxième Époque, 2025; English translation forthcoming from Routledge). She also published Avignon 68 & le Living Theatre. Mémoires d’une révolution (Deuxième Époque, 2018), a collection of interviews. 

She is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Miranda and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Nouvelles Scènes/Anglais, a series dedicated to theatre published by Presses Universitaires du Midi. She serves as President of the International Susan Glaspell Society and RADAC (Recherches sur les Arts Dramatiques Anglophones Contemporains) and coordinates the research project ACTiF (American Contemporary Theater in France). She is also Vice-President for Cultural Affairs at Toulouse–Jean Jaurès University. 

Jeffery Kennedy

Speaker

Jeffery Kennedy is an associate professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance at Arizona State University. He researches and writes about American theatre and is a leading scholar of the Provincetown Players, writing extensively on Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and other playwrights from the company. He is a former president of the Eugene O’Neill International Society, chaired its 2011 international conference in New York City, and has served on its board of directors. He’s currently on the board of the International Susan Glaspell Society. Jeff’s most recent book is Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players (U of Alabama Press), and he created the theatre research websites www.macdougalstreet.com and www.provincetownplayhouse.com. He received a Fulbright Scholar award in 2020 to research Colonial theatre at the British Library for his new book project titled “The View from the Stage: America’s Identity Performed,” which features thirteen American plays from 1767 through 1890, and he just completed a one-month research fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society for this project.