2026 Symposium / Plenary lecture
Barbara Fuchs delivers the plenary lecture, Cutting-Edge Comedia, on Saturday 19 September.
The theater world often creates unwarranted distinctions between classical theater on the one hand and avant-garde or postdramatic work on the other. How can we as scholars support and visibilize work that eschews these distinctions to bring comedia fully into the now?
This talk surveys partnerships and projects that engage theatermakers of all stripes in a vibrant dialogue with an endlessly generative corpus, and explores the techniques that help bring the corpus to contemporary audiences.
Distinguished Professor of Spanish and English at UCLA, where she directs the Diversifying the Classics project and serves as Associate Dean for Public and Engaged Humanities. She has published widely on early modern literature and culture as well as on contemporary performance.
Recent books include Fuente Ovejuna, an adaptation for children of the play by Lope de Vega (UANL, 2026), Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn, 2021) and Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is an editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and recently completed her term as Articles Editor for Renaissance Quarterly.
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