Tanya Pollard is a scholar of Shakespeare and early modern drama. A Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, she writes on the history of bodies, emotions, science, medicine, sexuality, gender, actors, performance, and responses to Greek theater. In addition to research, writing, and teaching, she works with theater companies on productions of early modern plays.
Scholarship
Pollard has written and edited 8 books and collections, most recently the Arden Edition of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (Bloomsbury, 2023), Reader in Tragedy: An Anthology of Classical Criticism to Contemporary Theory, co-edited with Marcus Nevitt (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (Oxford, 2017), which won the 2018 Roland H. Bainton Literature Book Prize. She has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, an NEH Research Fellowship, and a Rhodes Scholarship.
Theater Work
Pollard is chair of the Council of Scholars for Theatre for a New Audience, and works with other New York theater companies, including the Red Bull, the Public, and the Roundabout. She has appeared in PBS documentaries with Ethan Hawke and Christopher Plummer, served as Shakespeare consultant on Kiss Me Kate (Roundabout, 2019) starring Kelli O’Hara, and has participated in public conversations about Shakespeare with actors including Phylicia Rashad, James Earl Jones, Sam Waterston, F. Murray Abraham, and John Douglas Thompson, and with directors including Trevor Nunn, Greg Doran, Simon Goodwin, and Arin Arbus.
Aerial Work
Beyond her academic work, Pollard practices aerial circus skills, and performs on aerial silks.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
