About

Travis Curtright, PhD, is a scholar, theater director, and author. He currently serves as Chair of the Humanities and Liberal Studies Program at Ave Maria University in Southwest Florida, as well as Professor of Humanities and Literature, and director of Shakespeare in Performance, a troupe of actors and minor of studies.

Professor Curtright completed his education at the University of Dallas, earning his doctorate in Literature. He also has professional training from the American Shakespeare Center and studied improv at Chicago’s The Second City, and completed teacher training in Clown from Christopher Bayes at The Pandemonium Studio in New York City. 

At Ave Maria University, Dr. Curtright founded Shakespeare in Performance in 2012. He began with shows in a classroom at a university without a theater or drama department. As audiences grew, the call for a theater grew with them. To provide Professor Curtright’s students and program a home, the Donahue Family Black Box Theater was designed and completed in 2019.

The productions of Shakespeare in Performance eschew sets, keep the house lights up, and actors directly address audience members. Students are trained in voice, movement, and Shakespeare’s rhetoric. Professor Curtright adapts each play, finding contemporary analogues for characters and scenes, and adds pop music, contemporary dance, or music theatre, and improvisations that involve audience participation.

Beyond the theater, Professor Curtright serves as editor of Moreana: Thomas More and Renaissance Studies, an international, multilingual journal, published by Edinburgh University Press.

An accomplished scholar on Shakespeare and Thomas More, Travis Curtright has written The One Thomas More (Catholic University of America Press), Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), and The Controversial Thomas More (University of Notre Dame Press), as well as publishing numerous articles in academic periodicals on Shakespeare and Thomas More.

Contact Info

5050 Ave Maria Blvd.
Ave Maria, Florida, 34142

travis.curtright@avemaria.edu