Educator
Will cut his teeth in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he attended public school and went to church on Sundays. The last of three sons to be born to a pair of UCC ministers, it is perhaps fitting that he is the last of his siblings to buy a domain name and declare himself an artist on a website.
He earned his BA from Hampshire College in 2011, where he wrote a Division III project: “States unborn and accents yet unknown”: Shakespeare's Rome and the Interrogation of an Emergent Imperial Ideology in Early Modern England.
He stayed in Amherst, Massachusetts to earn his MA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He defended his dissertation, Globalizing Nature on the Shakespearean Stage, in 2018. This manuscript served as an early draft of his monograph, Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage, which was published in 2023 with Oxford University Press.
He is now a tenured professor of English at American International College in Springfield, MA, where he teaches interdisciplinary courses on writing and literature, including, “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” “Cannibal Fictions,” “Feminist Investigations of the Creature Feature,” “Environmental Literature,” “African American Literature,” and “Creative Writing.”
Scholar
Will’s scholarship is committed to an intersectional approach to literature that values a historical foundation. His work on Shakespeare and the early modern English stage seeks to combine an eco-critical investment in the non-human world with a postcolonial approach to histories told from the margins. His research interests include early modern drama and performance studies, cannibals, travel literature, and the environmental humanities.
Writer
Here’s the thing. I am also a human being. My life is full of stress, and a lot of it is from trying to keep up the appearance that I am a put-together professor and scholar. (See above).
You see that chicken I’m holding? That was an Easter egger named Hodor that I bought for my kids when they were sent home at the start of Covid. I loved that bird. She laid blue eggs for some mysterious reason, and the feathers on her face made her look like she was always smiling.
Then one night she was carried off by a fox and, I assume, eaten alive.
This is a dark and crazy world. I need a release. I need to write.
Try and stop me. I dare you.