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2010 Inge Festival - Scholar's Conference

Jackson R. Bryer (Conference Chair) is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1981, he served as a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities and for the William Inge Archives at Independence Community College. He is the editor of The Theatre We Worked For: The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth MacGowan (1982) and many other publications. In 1988, he published "An Interview with Robert Anderson I Studies in American Drama" and co-edited The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Neglected Stories and The Actor's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers. Recent publications include The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators and Conversations with August Wilson. His two most recent publications: as co-editor, The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (2008) and Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (2009). He received the Inge Festival's prestigious Jerome Lawrence Award in 2007.

Dr. Susan Abbotson is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Drama at Rhode Island College and author of Masterpieces of 20th-Century American Drama, Thematic Guide to Modern Drama, Student Companion to Arthur Miller and Critical Companion to Arthur Miller, as well as Understanding Death of a Salesman (co-authored with Brenda Murphy). She has also published articles on Tom Stoppard, August Wilson, Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams. She is currently the Performance Editor for the Arthur Miller Journal.

Marcel LaFlamme is the curator of the William Inge Collection at Independence Community College. Originally from Massachusetts, LaFlamme earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 2005, before training as a librarian and archivist at Simmons College. LaFlamme served as co-chair for the Simmons chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild, and he was awarded the 2007 Miriam Braverman Prize for excellence in graduate-level writing on the subject of librarianship and social responsibility. He has a deep-seated interest in the literature and culture of the Great Plains, and has recently presented conference papers on Kansas novelist Scott Heim and on the Lake Wobegon monologues of Garrison Keillor. He currently lives two blocks from William Inge's boyhood home.

Jef Petersen M.A. is currently working as a manager and director of an unscripted theatre group in Boise, ID. He is preparing to teach classes in acting, theatre history and playwriting at the College of Western Idaho and at the College of Idaho in the summer and fall of 2010. Jef is also following his true love and writing several projects for the stage and screen. Jef received his M.A. from the University of Oregon.

David Savran is a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first century American theatre, popular culture, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, including Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group; Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams; and most recently, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. He has published two collections of interviews with playwrights, In Their Own Words and The Playwright's Voice, and has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards. He is the editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and is the Vera Mowry Roberts Distinguished Professor of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Geetha M. Vivekanandhan, Associate Professor teaches English and Business Communication at the College of Vocational Studies, Delhi University, New Delhi, India. She has presented papers on William Inge, O.V.Vijayan and on Literature and the Environment on different occasions and at different forums. She has also conducted workshops on "Body Language". She has written a highly commended thesis entitled "Themes, Characters and Symbols in the plays of William Inge". And she is further working on William Inge. Geetha is known for her nano tales. She has also published a few poems and short stories. She is also good at the art of traditional Thanjavoor Painting. She is one of the Board of Examiners at the Delhi University and also holds other honorary administrative posts.

Philip Middleton Williams received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in drama from the University of Miami in 1974, a Master of Fine Arts in playwriting from the University of Minnesota in 1977, and a Ph.D. in theatre from the University of Colorado in 1988. His first play, THE HUNTER, was produced at the University of Minnesota in April 1977 as a part of his master's degree requirements. His other plays include DARK TWIST, THE PURER, BRIGHTER YEARS, and HERE'S HOPING. CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT YOU was his first play to receive a New York production, at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre in January 2008. In 1992 he was appointed to the national advisory board of the William Inge Theatre Festival. McFarland and Company published his doctoral thesis, A Comfortable House – Lanford Wilson, Marshall W. Mason and the Circle Repertory Theatre, in 1993. He wrote five articles on the life and works of Lanford Wilson for the The Facts on File Companion to American Drama, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, published in 2003. He presently lives in Palmetto Bay, Florida.

Dr. Howard Wolf is Emeritus Professor and Senior Fellow in The Department of English at SUNY-Buffalo, and has held two Fulbright Fellowships (Turkey, South Africa). He is a graduate of Amherst College (BA), Columbia University (MA), and The Univerity of Michigan (Ph.D). Most of his writing deals with "generational history": Forgive the Father: A Memoire of Changing Generations, Broadway Serenade (novel), and Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile. Howard Wolf has been building a collection of literary materials in Special Collections of The Amherst College Library since 1971. This collection itself is an archive of generational history—including a large collection of Professor Wolf's letters (together with a volume of travel letters: A Version of Home: Letters from the World). His great college roommate was raised in Hutchinson, KS.