Jill Marie Bradbury

My education includes BA degrees in Economics and English from the University of California, Irvine; an MA in Economics from George Mason University; and an MA/PhD in English from Brown University. Clearly, I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I eventually settled on being a theater scholar. I have received five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and multiple grants from private foundations to support Deaf and DeafBlind theater. My first NEA grant funded a DeafBlind Theater Initiative, documented in the video, “ProTactile Romeo and Juliet: Theater by/for the DeafBlind” (Gallaudet Video Services, 2019). Most recently, Dr. Janine Butler, a former colleague from the National Technical Institute of the Deaf, and I received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to support a mixed-methods study of captioning live theater for deaf and hard of hearing audiences. 

My publications include the collaborative essay "ProTactile Romeo and Juliet: Theater by/for the DeafBlind," Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019); “Audiences and ASL in Shakespeare Performance,” Shakespeare Bulletin 40.1 (2022); "Disability Embodiment and Inclusive Aesthetics," Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance (Routledge, 2023); and “Deaf Theatre in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (forthcoming 2024). With former RIT colleague Andy Head, I co-authored the book Staging Deaf and Hearing Theatre Productions: A Practical Guide (Palgrave, 2024).

My public facing scholarship includes a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read focused on Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic (2023). In collaboration with Monroe County Library Services and colleagues at NTID, I organized a month-long program of activities focused on Deaf poetry and poetry by Deaf authors. I also served as project director for the DC stop of First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare national traveling exhibition sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library (2016). For this month-long program, I worked with Gallaudet colleagues to organize a museum exhibit, Shakespeare in American Deaf History, and activities including a visual Shakespeare festival. My work has been featured in a Folger Shakespeare Library podcast on Shakespeare in Sign Language (2016), in Humanities, the Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2021), and Insight Into Diversity (2022). 

Current work in progress includes an article titled "The Problem of Music in Deaf-Hearing Musical Theater,” for a special issue on disability and theater in Studies in Musical Theater; a chapter on “Deaf Actors and Shakespeare” in the forthcoming An Alternative History of Shakespearean Acting: Contexts, Practices, and Cultural Authority, ed. Sally Barnden, Emer McHugh, and Miranda Faye Thompson (Bloomsbury). A chapter titled “Sound in ASL Shakespeare” is also forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Sound, ed. Carla Della Gatta and Simon Smith sometime in 2027. Finally, I am writing a book about the history of Deaf theater in the United States. 

Fun fact - Not only am I the first full-time, tenure line Deaf faculty at UMD College Park, I am also the first Deaf person to run a hearing performing arts department in the United States. Deaf people still have a long way to go to reach true equality.