Felicia Hardison Londre
Felicia Hardison Londré is Curators’ Professor of Theatre at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Honorary Co-Founder of Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, and dramaturg for Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. From 1978 to 2000, she was dramaturg for Missouri Repertory Theatre. She was invested in the the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center in 1999, and served a term (2012-14) as Dean of the College. The Enchanted Years of the Stage: Kansas City at the Crossroads of American Theatre, 1870-1930, is Felicia Londré’s twelfth book and the one she most loved working on. The most recent of her fourteen books are the Historical Dictionary of American Theatre: Modernism (with James Fisher, Scarecrow Press) and her play Duse and D’Annunzio translated into Korean by Sujin Kang with an introduction by Felicia in English. Dr. Londré earned her B.A. in French at the University of Montana followed by a year of Fulbright study at the Université de Caen, her M.A. in Romance Languages at the University of Washington, and her Ph.D. in Speech-Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Specializing in French, Russian, Spanish, and American theatre history of the 19th and 20th centuries, she has taught at UMKC since 1978, with visiting professorships at Hosei University in Tokyo and Marquette University in Milwaukee. Felicia Londré received ATHE’s Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education Award (2001), the Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama (2011), and a University of Montana Distinguished Alumna Award (1998). She was elected to the National Theatre Conference in 2001, and inducted as a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference in 2002. Besides researching theatre history and publishing on it, Felicia loves to give public lectures. In 2003 she presented a slide lecture on A Streetcar Named Desire at the Sorbonne and at the Universities of Rouen and Caen. She gave her Shakespeare authorship lecture (now on PowerPoint!) at Ole Miss in June 2008, and has given it on a lecture tour of Hungary as well as in Hawaii, Tokyo, Beijing, and elsewhere.
