UBC First Folio Research Cluster

Paul Budra teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature and has published articles on Renaissance literature and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition and Shakespeare Early and Late: A Textbook. He is the co-editor of the essay collections Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel; Soldier Talk: Oral Narratives of the Vietnam War; From Text to Txting: New Media in the Classroom; and Shakespeare and Consciousness. He is a past president of the Pacific Northwest Renaissance Society, former Chair of SFU’s English Department, former Associate Dean of SFU’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and winner of the SFU Excellence in Teaching Award for 2004. He is the director of SFU Publications.

Patricia Badir is Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. She teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance literature and publishes on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as on the literary afterlives of New Testament saints. She is currently finishing a book on Shakespeare and colonial infrastructure in British Columbia, tentatively titled Settling Shakespeare: Bardolaty in BC, 1900-1960.

Linc Kesler has degrees in English literature from Yale and the University of Toronto. At UBC, he served as the first director of First Nations Studies in the Faculty of Arts and then worked in central administration on Indigenous strategic initiatives as Director of the First Nations House of Learning and Senior Advisor to the President on Aboriginal Affairs. He led the development of the university’s first Indigenous strategic plan and other initiatives, including the establishment of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. Since becoming an emeritus professor, he has returned to research and is completing a book, on Early Modern drama, time, and causality.

Aaron T. Pratt is Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, a special collections library, archive, and museum at the University of Texas at Austin. His research and teaching focus on bibliography, the history of the book, and the literature and culture of early modern England. His writing has appeared — or will soon appear — in a number of venues, both academic and public, including Fine Books and Collections, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, The Library, and edited collections published by Oxford and Cambridge. His first major exhibition, The Long Lives of Very Old Books, is open at the Ransom Center through the end of the year.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is the author of The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio (2015, second ed. 2023) and Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book (2016, second ed. 2023). Her work focuses on Shakespeare’s reception in print, performance, and criticism. She has worked as a dramaturg, is Associate Scholar with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is the 2023 Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe. She is currently working on an edition of Twelfth Night.

Moya O’Connell is a Canadian director, actor, and educator. Most recent: Acting- The Sound Inside for Coalmine Theatre (Toronto). Directing- Hedda Gabler for United Players (Vancouver). Eleven seasons at The Shaw Festival, eight seasons at Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival and seen in countless productions across this vast country playing leading roles in the theatre.

She has played Queens, warriors, princesses, conspirators, daughters, wives, mothers, psychopaths, writers, waitresses, fascists, teachers, heiresses, paupers, ingenues, heroines, harridans, weightlifters, scientists, socialites, academics, nuns, political radicals, housewives, and ordinary citizens. Slammed doors in farces, killed herself in tragedies, kissed and slapped faces in romantic comedies, been shipwrecked, robbed, cheated on, murdered, lied to, fallen in love over and over, tried to escape evil stepmothers and  found severed heads. She has killed emperors, seen ghosts, gone mad and been shot in the head an uncommon amount of times. 

She loves language and spends any time she has away from stage and screen teaching. She is the senior instructor of acting at Vancouver Film School, adjunct professor at UBC, and a Teaching Artist with Bard on The Beach. MFA in directing from UBC. Next up: directing Hedda Gabler for Coalmine Theatre’s 2024 season in a new adaptation by Liisa Repo-Martell.