Faculty Fellow

Ellen MacKay

Associate Professor of English and Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS) University of Chicago

Biography

Ellen MacKay is an Associate Professor of English and of Theatre and Performance Studies (TAPS) at the University of Chicago, where she is Interim Deputy Dean for the Arts in the Division of the Arts & Humanities and Interim Senior Advisor to the Provost for the Arts. She is the author of Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England (Chicago 2011), the editor of the Luminary tablet edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the author of multiple journal articles and chapters about theatre history, practice, and theory. Her research takes performance as a site of complex meaning-making that is distinct from and often insubordinate to the play text. Her current book project, tentatively called How to Be a Joke, explores shrew-taming, a popular theme of early modern comedy, as an unheralded cognitive resource of theatrical design. MacKay has a longstanding interest in the affordances of digital media for theatrical research. An alumna of the first Early Modern Digital Agendas Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, she directed the Institute for the Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University (2016-17) and led the Shakespeare stream of the CEDAR Project (2019–23), which sought to develop a platform for shared literacy across widely variant canons. What Was Theatre in 1609? builds on that ambition by bringing non-semantic theatrical content online.

Topics

Featured Project

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What Was Theatre in 1609?

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2026 – 2028

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Projects

CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

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CEDAR Phase Two: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

This project extends a multi-year digital humanities initiative that is producing critical editions of canonical texts. In the first phase, the research team built a database that includes the Gilgamesh Epic, the Hebrew Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. In this phase they will add the Egyptian Book...

CEDAR is a multi-project digital humanities initiative involving literary corpora that have complex histories of composition, revision, and dissemination. The first phase of the project focused on three corpora written in different historical periods using very different languages and scripts. The ...

Project Team:

2022 – 2023

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The CEDAR Project: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

A screenshot of the CEDAR database shows sophisticated digital analysis of a biblical text.

The CEDAR Project: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research

This project aims to produce open-access critical editions of four key textual corpora: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and a body of Middle Bengali poetry.

The CEDAR project aims to produce critical editions for the digital age. It brings together six faculty members from four different departments and schools in the University of Chicago as well as scholarly advisors from beyond the University. The textual foci of the project are four distinct ...

Project Team:

2019 – 2022

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