SIMON WILLIAMS
Simon
Williams, Professor and Graduate Advisor, teaches theatre history,
dramatic literature, and the history of opera. He specializes in the European
theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but has also published in
the field of Irish drama and in a variety of topics relating to the performance
of opera. He is currently writing a history of Romantic acting and is converting
a series of lectures he gave at the Bayreuth Festival into a book on Wagnerian
music drama. He is also collaborating with colleagues from other universities on
a history of world theatre. He recently directed the UCSB Opera Theatre in
Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1998), Mozart’s La finta
giardiniera (1999), Massenet’s Werther (2000) and, in February
2002, he directed Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel.