Karen Raber, a professor of English at the University of Mississippi has been named executive director of the Shakespeare Association of America. The nonprofit, professional organization advances the academic study of Shakespeare’s plays and poems along with his cultural and theatrical contexts and their roles in world culture. The Shakespeare Association of America holds an annual conference each spring and also sponsors a number of seminars and workshops each year.
The association, founded in 1972, has been housed at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Now the organization will be headquartered at the University of Mississippi.
Professor Raber joined the faculty of the University of Mississippi in 1995. She specializes in Renaissance literature with emphasis on ecostudies, animal studies, and posthumanist theory. Professor Raber is the author of Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (Bloomsbury, 2018), Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), and Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2001).
Dr. Raber is a graduate of Yale University. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.