Sabina Amanbayeva is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “The Pleasure and Profit of Laughter on the Early Modern English Stage, 1590-1610,” investigates the status of laughter and theories of comedy in the plays of Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare as well as in early modern cony-catching pamphlets and jestbooks. She is especially interested in the intersection between the early modern theories of embodiment and the role of contemporary theater as a source of laughter and bodily/psychological transformation for the audience. She has recently presented conference papers on Twelfth Night (Northeast Modern Language Association, March 2013), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare Association of America, April 2012), and Volpone (Shakespeare Association of America, April 2011).
John Bruns is an Associate Professor of English and the director of the Film Studies Program at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Loopholes: Reading Comically (Transaction, 2009). Among his many conference presentations and articles are several on comedy, including “Get Out of Gaol Free, Or: How to Read a Comic Plot,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35.1 (2005); “Baffling Doom: Dialogue, Laughter, and Comic Perception in Henry James,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 47.1 (2005); and “Laughter in the Aisles: Affect and Power in Contemporary Theoretical and Cultural Discourse,” Studies in American Humor n.s. 3.7 (2000).
Lauren Caldwell is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “Trifling with the Law: Obligation and Compensation on the Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Comic Stage,” investigates the interpenetration of marriage law and marriage comedy in the long eighteenth century, asking how comic playwrights engaged with and intervened in ongoing popular debates about the nature and extent of obligation in marriage—legal and otherwise. Her article “‘Drink up all the Water in the Sea:’ Contracting Relationships in Congreve’s Love for Love and The Way of the World” is forthcoming from ELH.
Andrew Stott is Professor of English and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Comedy (Routledge, 2005) and The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness, and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (Canongate, 2009), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction, the George Freedley Memorial Award, and the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography. Most recently he has published “Clowns on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Dickens, Coulrophobia, and the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi” in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 12.4 (2012). Other essays on comedy have been published in The Upstart Crow and The Renaissance Theatre: Performance, Design (Ashgate, 1999).