Carla Della Gatta

Carla Della Gatta is a theatre historian and performance theorist who examines ethnic and bilingual theatre through dramaturgy and aurality. She built and maintains the only archive of Latinx theatrical adaptation, LatinxShakespeares.Org. She is the author of Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater (Michigan, 2023) and co-editor of Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edinburgh UP, 2021). Her work has been published in collections as well as in journals such as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, Bulletin of the Comediantes, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Theatre Journal. In 2018, she received a Woodrow Wilson (now Citizens and Scholars) Career Enhancement Fellowship. She received the J Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America, and she has received fellowships and awards from the Folger Shakespeare Library, ASTR, the New York Public Library, and more. 

Della Gatta collaborated with the UCLA Comedia in Translation and Performance Working Group to translate Ana Caro’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs in 2019 (Juan de la Cuesta Press, 2021). Della Gatta was an academic advisor for the Public Humanities Initiative at The Public Theater in 2019. Her public scholarship can be found online in podcasts, essays, program notes, interviews, and panel conversations with HowlRound, Shakespeare Center Los Angeles, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Classic Stage Company, Shakespeare St. Louis, the Folger Shakespeare Library, The Sol Project, and Victory Gardens Theater. 
She is on the Steering Committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons, and she is the Digital Humanities Editor for The Fornés Institute. She serves on the editorial boards of Shakespeare Survey and for the Arden series on Shakespeare and Social Justice. Della Gatta served on the Governing Council for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) from 2019-21, and she has served on awards committees for the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). 

Areas of Specialization:
Latinx drama, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, LGBTQ drama, Spanish Golden Age drama, adaptation theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, critical race and ethnicity theory

Editorial, Advisory, and Theatre Boards:

• Digital Humanities Editor, The Fornés Institute, 2022 – present.
• Advisory Board, Shakespeare and Social Justice series, Arden Shakespeare, 2021-present.
• Advisory Board, Shakespeare Survey, 2021-present.
• Performance Review Editor (English), Teatro Magazine, 2021-23.
• Editorial Board, Teatro: Revista de Estudios Culturales / A Journal of Cultural Studies, 2021-23.
• Board Member, Expand the Canon Initiative, Hedgepig Theatre Ensemble, 2020-21.
• Member-At-Large / Liaison to the Operations Committee, Governing Council, Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), 2019-21.
• Steering Committee Member, Latinx Theatre Commons, 2017 – present.

Areas of Specialization:

Latinx drama, Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, LGBTQ drama, Spanish Golden Age drama, adaptation theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, critical race and ethnicity theory

Representative Publications/Research Activities:

Books
Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater, University of Michigan Press, January 2023. 

Shakespeare and Latinidad. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Edited with Trevor Boffone.

Digital Humanities
Latinx Shakespeares.Org. Created, built, and manage an online archive of Latinx theatre adaptation.

Representative Recent Essays: 

“Octavio Solis,” Fifty Key Figures in LatinX and Latin American Theater, eds. Paola S. Hernández and Analola Santana. Routledge, 2022. 

“Afterword,” in Shakespeare and ‘Accentism,’ ed. Adele Lee, Routledge, 2021.

“The Aleph and the Space of Shakespeare,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, Tenth Anniversary Edition on ‘Confessions’, Vol. 11, No.2-3 (2020).

“Confronting Bias and Identifying Facts: Teaching Resistance through Shakespeare,” in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, eds. Hillary Eklund and Wendy Hyman, Edinburgh UP, 2019.

“Shakespeare, Race, and ‘Other’ Englishes: The Q Brothers’s Othello: The Remix,” in Shakespeare Survey, Special Edition on ‘Re-Creating Shakespeare’, Vol. 71 (2018).

Representative Recent Public Work

“Making Difference,” Program Note for West Side Story, Lyric Opera of Chicago, June 2023.

“Writing the Past into the Present” Program Note for Life is a Dream by María Irene Fornés, Baltimore Center Stage, 2023.

“Justice and Revolution,” Program Note for Measure for Measure, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 2022.

Featured Guest, “How We Hear Shakespeare’s Plays,” Folger Shakespeare Library Shakespeare Unlimited podcast, 2021. 

“Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet Turns 25,” Shakespeare & Beyond, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2021.

“Staging Bilingual Classical Theatre,” HowlRound, 15 September 2020.

Invited Panelist, “Shakespeare’s Heroines,” Shakespeare Hour Live!, Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2020.

“Bilingual Classical Theatre,” Classic Stage Company, 2020. 

Representative Fellowships, Grants, and Awards:

• Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) Online Scholarship, Renaissance Society of America, 2023.
• Susan Snyder Fellow, Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, 2022-23.
• Renaissance Society of America (RSA) Diversity Grant, 2022.
• First Year Assistant Professor (FYAP) Grant, Florida State University, 2020.
• Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship, The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now Citizens and Scholars), 2018-19.
• Folger Shakespeare Library Short-Term Fellowship, 2018-19.
• The Mellon School of Theater & Performance Research, Harvard University Summer Session, 2018.
• New York Public Library Short Term Fellowship, 2017.
• American Society for Theatre Research Targeted Area Research Award, 2016.
• J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize, Shakespeare Association of America, 2016.