Andrew Shankman, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden, is the author of over two dozen essays and reviews. His book Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania was a History Book Club selection. His article “A New Thing on Earth: Alexander Hamilton, Pro-Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Economy” received the Program in Early American Economy and Society best article prize and the Ralph D. Gray Society for Historians of the Early American Republic prize for best article published in the Journal of the Early Republic. His edited collection of essays, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic is forthcoming from Routledge in 2014.
Laura Grace Pattillo, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, earned her B.A. in Theatre and English at the University of Richmond and her Ph.D. in English with a minor in Theatre at Louisiana State University. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, playwriting, and dramaturgy and serves as Co-Artistic Director of the SJU Theatre Company. Her research focuses primarily on American drama with a specific interest in Southern and Appalachian plays, and she also wrote a chapter on drama for a 2005 reference book, The American President in Popular Culture. In addition to having acted in dozens of plays before coming to Philadelphia, Pattillo also co-directed two prison inmate theatre companies producing original inmate-created works in Louisiana and Kentucky. She is currently directing her tenth production at SJU, Arthur Miller’s version of An Enemy of the People, which runs Feb 14-24.