Faculty & Staff: Faculty

Contact Info Dept. of Drama & Dance Aidekman 201 Medford, MA 02155 Phone: 617-627-2230 Email Professor

Drama

Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Oratory and Director of Graduate Studies
Dramatic Literature and Theory, Theatre and Film History

Laurence Senelick is the Director of Graduate Studies, Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. His expertise is in Russian theatre and drama, history of popular entertainment, gender and performance, history of directing, classical theory. Prof. Senelick is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being Theatre Arts on Acting and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre. Others books include: The Chekhov Theatre and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, as well as over a hundred articles in journals. He is a former Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin.

Prof. Senelick has named a Distinguished Scholar by both the American Society of Theatre Research and the Faculty Research Council of Tufts University. He is the recipient of grants and awards from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, He has received the Barnard Hewitt Award of the American Society for Theatre Research for The Chekhov Theatre; the George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association for The Age and Stage of George L. Fox and The Changing Room; and the George Jean Nathan Award for best dramatic criticism of 2000. He holds the St. George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian art and scholarship, and is honorary curator of Russian theatre at the Harvard Theatre Collection. In 2008 he won the Graduate Teaching award (doctoral level) of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. He is a widely produced translator of plays from such authors as Chekhov and Feydeau, and director at Tufts of his own translations of The Inspector General, The Bakkhai? and Anything to Declare? He has acted and directed with such organizations as the Loeb Drama Center, the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Baroque, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the revue The Proposition. He recently devised new courses on Cabaret, Theatre Iconography, and Low Comedy. His recipes appear in the Bon Appetit cookbooks.

Courses Taught:
DR 43/143 Gay & Lesbian Theater & Film
DR 94-02 Cabaret
DR 193, 194 Senior seminar in Low Comedy
DR 236 Ibsen and Strindberg
DR 240 History of Popular Entertainment
DR 249 History of Directing
DR 251 Pre-Revolutionary Russian Drama and Theater
DR 252 Post-Revolutionary Russian Drama and Theater
DR 261/262 Dramatic Theory and Criticism
DR 265 Theatre Iconography