THE PANEL
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ABOUT THE PANEL
DUSTIN D. STEWART (PhD Texas 2013) specializes in the literature and culture of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with broader interests in poetics and theology. He has taught courses at Columbia on British poetry from John Milton to Romanticism, the prehistory of the Gothic, religion and the English novel, mobility and emotion in the Enlightenment, and the literature of the nonhuman (from angels to AI). His first book, titled Futures of Enlightenment Poetry, has recently been published by Oxford University Press. A study of materialism and devotion after Milton, it asks how poets can give their readers an experience of the afterlife in the here and now. A second book in the making, exploring religious understandings of space in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, involves ongoing research on the Anglican parish, Methodist spirituality, Black British writing, and natural history and natural theology. Taken together, these research projects play up the new uses to which old religious questions were put in Enlightenment-era cultural debates and literary practices.
GAYE TAYLOR UPCHURCH is a freelance director with a background in dance. She has directed the world premieres of Lauren Gunderson's The Half-Life of Marie Curie (with Kate Mulgrew and Francesca Faridany at Minetta Lane, Audible Theater); Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match (Roundabout and The Old Globe); Animal (with Rebecca Hall at Atlantic Theater and Studio Theatre, Helen Hayes nom for best direction), Bethany with America Ferrera (Women’s Project Theater and Old Globe); Nick Gandiello’s The Blameless (Old Globe); other off-Broadway includes Simon Stephens’s Harper Regan and Bluebird with Simon Russell Beale (Atlantic Theater Company), Nancy Harris’s Our New Girl (Atlantic), and Lucy Thurber’s Stay (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater). Selected regional credits include Member of the Wedding (Williamstown), the musical Songbird (Two River), The Year of Magical Thinking (with Kathleen Turner at Arena Stage), An Iliad (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and West Point), As You Like It (Hudson Valley and Folger Theater in Washington, DC, the international Falstaff Award for Best Production and nomination for Best Director).