Ann Pleiss Morris

Editor

Ann Pleiss Morris is an English Ph.D. candidate at the University of Iowa and received her M.Litt in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia.

Ann is currently working on a dissertation which examines twenty-first-century productions of The Tempest and considers how Shakespearean texts are being used to address social issues and build new communities. She teaches General Education Literature at the University of Iowa and is an adjunct English instructor at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She has acted in many Shakespeare roles, directed theater, and written original plays.

Ann has presented research including ‘I shall be hiss’d at, on my life now’: Liminality and the Boy in Early Modern Inductions at the Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference and the Blackfriars Conference, A Community of Voices: Using Literature to Explore Trauma at the Jakobsen Graduate Conference, ‘What’s Past is Prologue’: Negotiating Original Staging Practices with Contemporary Audiences at the Blackfriars Conference, and Building Modern Communities with Original Practice Performance at Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. She will be presenting her essay Mentoring Behind Bars: Teaching Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars to Introductory Literature Students at this fall’s Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference.

For the 2010-2011 academic year, Ann is the Elizabeth Dietz Fellow and the Sherman Paul/Prairie Lights Scholar at the University of Iowa. She was named an Outstanding Teaching Assistant at the University in 2010. She was a graduate fellow for the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy in 2009. She was also a regional finalist in the American College Theatre Short Play Competition in 2005 and the first place winner of the Hardford Community College One-Act Play Competition in 2004.