Bess Rowen, Ph.D.

Bess Rowen is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY and her MA in Performance Studies from New York University after completing a BA in English and Theatre (with a minor in Psychology) at Lehigh University. Her work focuses on what she terms "affective stage directions," which are stage directions written in ways that engage the physical and emotional responses of future theatre makers. While at CUNY, she was the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Public Humanities as well as a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship. She is a proud member of the Actors’ Equity Association and has studied acting at Michael Howard Studios, The Berkshire Theatre Festival, and The Gaiety School of Acting in Ireland. Aside from acting, she has also played with stage directions as the co-director of Eugene O'Neill's Marco Millions with Target Margin Theater and in her short play for Imagined Theatres. Bess is the Performance Review Editor for The Eugene O'Neill Review and serves as an editor for Villanova's graduate interdisciplinary journal, Concept. She is the incoming LGBTQ Focus Group Representative for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and serves as the liaison to the Modern Language Association for both the American Theatre & Drama Society and the Eugene O’Neill Society. Recent works include a new student critical edition of A Streetcar Named Desire for Methuen Drama, two entries in 50 Key Figures in Queer US Theatre (edited by Jordan Schildcrout and Jimmy Noriega), and the chapter “The Play in the Bubble: Heroes of the Fourth Turning and Political Isolation in the Time of Covid” in Text & Presentation 2021. Other articles can be found in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism The Eugene O'Neill Review, and The Tennessee Williams Annual Review. At Villanova, she teaches graduate courses on theatre theory, dramatic literature, academic writing, and gender & sexuality studies, and undergraduate courses in acting, gender & sexuality studies, and true crime. She also works as an intimacy professional.

You can learn more about Bess and her work on Facebook, Academia.edu, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and Goodreads. For a schedule of upcoming special appearances and engagements, click here.