MICHAEL Y. BENNETT is Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Known for his work on absurd drama and literature and on the philosophy of theatre and performance, he is the author or editor of eleven books. In Summer 2020, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Clare Hall, after which time he will be a Life Member of Clare Hall. He was a UW System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison in Spring 2014. He received the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Outstanding Research Award in 2015. In addition to being on the Advisory Boards of Comparative Drama and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and serving on the Board of Directors of The Edward Albee Society, he is Series Editor of New Perspectives in Edward Albee Studies.
He is the author of six books that explore the intersections of drama, theatre, and performance studies; philosophy; and history: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Routledge 2018); Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (Routledge 2017; Foreword by Marvin Carlson and Afterword by James R. Hamilton); The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge University Press 2015 Hb/PB); Narrating the Past through Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2012/Pb 2016); and Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (Palgrave Macmillan 2011/Pb 2013).
He is the editor of five book collections on specific modern dramatists, with three on Oscar Wilde: Philosophy and Oscar Wilde (Palgrave Macmillan 2017); Oscar Wilde’s Society Plays (Palgrave Macmillan 2015/Pb 2016); and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (Rodopi 2011). He has also edited Edward Albee and Absurdism (Brill 2017) and co-edited, with Benjamin D. Carson, Eugene O’Neill’s One-Act Plays (Palgrave Macmillan 2012/Pb 2014).
[PLEASE NOTE: If you have come across my name and/or my wife’s name on tell-all websites, both my wife and I have active harassment restraining orders against the person writing these (as the judge declared) “slander[ous]” posts. This person has further been charged with multiple criminal counts of violating these restraining orders and is awaiting trial.]
