Andrea Stevens

Biography

Specializing in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Andrea Stevens is Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and affiliated faculty at the European Union Center. She is the author of Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama (2013) and her edition of William Heminge’s 1639 tragedy The Fatal Contract – the first modernized edition of this play-text – can be found in the new Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (2020). At the present time, she’s working on two separate book projects: Racial Masquerade at the Caroline Court and Shakespeare, Gender, and the Performance of the Commonplace.  With the UIUC department of Theatre, she has adapted for performance and/or served as dramaturg for several Shakespeare productions, most recently Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet; in 2015, she directed her own adaptation of The Duchess of Malfi at the Armory Free Theatre. For the Department of Theatre she has supervised or served on committees for a range of graduate projects both in and outside of her primary field of early modern drama.