Ellen MacKay is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the College.
As the interim senior advisor to the provost for the arts, Ellen serves as the provost’s primary faculty advisor for arts at the University and is charged with advancing UChicago’s eminence in this area and fostering its success. In her role as senior advisor, she provides oversight to the leadership of Court Theatre and the Smart Museum, including the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry. Through her interim deputy dean position, she also works closely UChicago Arts, providing oversight to the leadership of Arts + Public Life, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
Ellen’s research focuses on theatre theory and performance studies, with particular attention to early modern English theatre. Her first book, Persecution, Plague and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England, examines the epistemology of the Shakespearean stage through the lens of its dissolution, arguing that loss and paucity in the historical archive reflect the theatre’s distinctive relationship to knowledge and impermanence. Recent research interests have a more materialist bent, by focusing on the properties of the stage and the arguments that they tacitly make about representation’s resistance to the reflection of ‘real life.’ Her current book project tracks shrew-taming as a codifying resource for theatricality, broadly construed. It shows how sets, costumes, sound, lights, stage management, etc., use comic systems of subordination to paint a theatrical picture. Ellen also works at the intersection of performance studies and digital humanities, and previously directed the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University.
She earned her BA in Theatre from Barnard College, and a joint PhD in in English and Theatre from Columbia University, with a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.
