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 prestigious The Second 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 each production continued to amaze and delight audiences, the call for a theater grew. The university’s administration and donors agreed. 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, stagecraft, and especially Shakespeare’s language and rhetoric. Professor Curtright also modernizes the plays by reimagining conventional ideas about characters, scenes, or the delivery of monologues; and by adding pop music, contemporary forms of dance, or music theater; and with improvisations that involve audience participation.

A skilled acting coach and award-winning teacher, Dr. Curtright invites students of any major or career path to encounter Shakespeare’s art through performance. He presents the craft of acting as a sincere gift of self, combining the practice of acting techniques with St. John Paul II’s vision of the human person. Friendship, too, should be part of the experience that theater provides, especially during the college years, so that young or new actors find encouragement. Students rehearse in a safe environment that encourages growth in self-knowledge, creative risk-taking, and ensemble work. Students and graduates, as reported in the Naples Daily News, call acting under Dr. Curtright’s direction a “life-changing experience.”

Beyond the theater, Professor Curtright is known as editor of Moreana: Thomas More and Renaissance Studies, a journal published by Edinburgh University Press. Moreana is an international, multilingual and non-confessional journal, published in double issues, in June and December. The journal was first published in 1963 by Germain Marc’hadour within the Amici Thomae Mori society.

An accomplished scholar and influential voice in both Shakespeare in performance and Thomas More studies, Travis Curtright has written The One Thomas More, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Persons, and co-edited Shakespeare’s Last Plays: Readings in Literature and Politics, as well as publishing numerous articles in academic periodicals on Shakespeare or More.

Travis and his wife, Mary, are also the parents of five children, all of whom are named after Shakespeare characters. To the delight of Shakespeare in Performance troupe members, the Curtrights seamlessly mesh family life and troupe life. Their troupe members are family, and their family is actively involved with SIP.

For more information and blogs, see other sites at http://traviscurtright.net and http://traviscurtright.org.

To hear Travis and Mary discuss Shakespeare, love, and how Shakespeare in Performance has evolved throughout the years, listen to their chat with Emily of Utah Shakespeare Festival on their Play On! podcast.  

Contact Info

5050 Ave Maria Blvd.
Ave Maria, Florida, 34142

travis.curtright@avemaria.edu