Dr. Kevin Donovan
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies

Member, Graduate Faculty

Office: PH 316; Phone/Voice Mail: 898-5898

Kevin Donovan has taught in the MTSU English Department since 1989 and is the current Director of Graduate Studies for the Department. He received his B.A. from Boston College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The author of published essays on early modern British and Irish dramatists and dramatic texts, he is the editor, with Christopher Wheatley, of the two volume Irish Drama of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Thoemmes Publishing, 2003). He has co-directed the Conference on John Milton since 1991 and has served as campus coordinator for a series of week-long educational residencies by Shakespearean actors from the London stage. He has recently completed the historical survey of interpretive criticism on King Lear for the forthcoming New Variorum edition of the play.

See Publications

Presentations

• "Being ‘Jonsonian' in Strafford's Dublin: The Case of Henry Burnell." Marlowe Society of America Sixth International Conference, 2008.
• “Being ‘Jonsonian' in Wentworth's Dublin : The Case of Henry Burnell.” For the seminar “Drama and the Making of National Identity in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Association of America, Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting, Apr. 5-7, 2007.
• “Lear's Awakening (IV.vii): A Defense of the Quarto.” Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Sixty-Third Annual Meeting, Oct. 6-7, 2006.
• "The Awakening of Lear: Texts and Contexts.” For the seminar “ King Lear,” Shakespeare Association of America, Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting, Apr. 13-15, 2006.
• "Mother Ireland and the Farmer: Ideological Dissonance in a Political Play." American Conference for Irish Studies, Southern Regional Meeting, Feb. 22-24, 2001.
• "Forms of Authority in the Early Texts of Every Man Out of His Humour." Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance. An International Conference at the School of English, Leeds University, July 5-7, 1995.
• "Riotous Farce: The Texts of Thomas Sheridan's The Brave Irishman." American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, National Conference, April 5-6, 1995.
• "Representing Ireland on the Eighteenth-Century Dublin Stage." American Conference for Irish Studies, Southern Regional Meeting, March 3-4, 1994.
• "Eighteenth-Century Gestures Towards an Irish National Theater." Belmont University Symposium on Irish Literature, March 21, 1994.
• "Henry Brooke, Charles Lucas, and Jack the Giant Queller: Political Theater in Eighteenth-Century Dublin." South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 11-14, 1993.