ELLEN MACKAY is an associate professor of English and former Chair of the Program in Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS) at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago 2011), the director of the Folger-Luminary app edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and since 2014, she has served as the Head Scholar of the Folger-NEH Teaching Shakespeare Institute. Before coming to the University of Chicago in 2017, she was the Director of the Institute for the Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University. Her recent research addresses Shakespeare and Renaissance theatricality as it passes through unexpected media and materials, from Staffordshire figurines to gamified training sites, forged documents, and the recovered skeleton of Richard III. Thanks to the discoveries that the Shrew stream of the Neubauer-supported CEDAR project afforded, she is currently at work on a book that addresses the legacy of taming on early English theatrical design.
Bio as of 10/2026