Robert Myers, Professor of English and Creative Writing/Director of CASAR
PhD (Yale, 1995); BA (Eckerd College)
Robert Myers (
www.robert-myers.com) is a Professor of English and Creative Writing. He is co-director of AUB's Theatre Initiative, a former director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Center for American Studies (CASAR) and a founding member of Tahweel Ensemble Theatre. He is a playwright and cultural historian whose areas of interest include modern and contemporary literature, theatre and arts from the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the Arab world. His stage plays include
Atwater: Fixin’ to Die, The Lynching of Leo Frank, Dead of Night: The Execution of Fred Hampton, Painting Persia, Mesopotamia, Unmanned, which he adapted as
Drone Pilots for BBC’s Radio 4, and
Twilight Country, which was a headline event at the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival, where it featured the acclaimed actress Kathleen Chalfant. He has co-translated a number of plays from Arabic with Nada Saab, including
Baghdadi Bath, by Iraqi director Jawad Al Assadi (produced at LaMama in New York);
The Dictator, by Lebanese playwright ‘Issam Mahfouz (published by
PAJ, produced at the Between the Seas festival in New York, directed by Sahar Assaf);
Rituals of Signs and Transformations, by Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous (produced with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation at Babel Theatre in Beirut, directed by Sahar Assaf); and
The Rape, also by Wannous (produced at Irwin Theatre in Beirut, directed by Sahar Assaf). He is currently co-editing and co-translating
Sentence to Hope, a Wannous reader, for Yale University Press's Margellos World Republic of Letters and
Contemporary Levantine Political Theatre, an anthology and critical edition, for Brill-Leiden. He has a PhD in literature from Yale, with a focus on Spanish, Portuguese, and Hispano-Arabic literatures, and is the recipient of a Franke fellowship from Yale, two Fulbright fellowships, a Mellon grant and a New York State Individual Artist’s grant. He has written on theatre and culture for
The New York Times, PAJ, Theatre Research International, Middle East Critique, Folha de São Paulo and other publications.
Courses he has taught include:
ENGL 309B Latin American modernisms
ENGL 306M Literature and Science
ENGL 304 The Making of Modern American Drama
ENGL 325 Historical Theatre
ENGL 325 The Making of Modern European Drama
ENGL 251 Playwriting
ENGL 244M Workshop in Theater Production
ENGL 215A Modern British and Irish Theatre
ENGL 216 Modern American Theatre
ENGL 225 Modern American Fiction
CVSP 212 Modern and Contemporary World Theatre