Katherine Brokaw researches and teaches Shakespearean performance, medieval and early modern drama, and eco-theatre. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval Early English Drama (Cornell University Press, 2016), which in 2018 won the David Bevington Award for best new book in early English drama studies. She has also published articles and reviews in Shakespeare Bulletin, Critical Survey, Comparative Drama, Literature Compass, and Pedagogy, and in several edited books. She is co-editor, with Jay Zysk, of Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and the editor of the Arden Performance Edition of Macbeth (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is currently writing a monograph on Shakespeare in community performance, and several articles on Shakespeare and/as eco-theatre.

At UC Merced, she teaches medieval and early modern literature, Shakespeare, world drama, and children’s literature in the undergraduate English Program, and classes on theatre and community in English and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program and SPARK GE program.

Brokaw is co-founder, co-producer, and co-director of Shakespeare and Yosemite, which debuted in April 2017. The now annual festival is supported by several grants from UC Merced and the University of Warwick (UK) as well as the National Parks Service, and features a combination of student, professional, and community actors. She also co-produces UC Merced’s annual children’s opera, which brings 3500 area schoolchildren to campus every May to experience live opera. For her service to the Merced-area community, she was awarded the 2017 UC Merced distinguished scholarly public service award, and was also recognized by the Merced Sun Star as a “20 Under 40” winner. She acts, directs, and dramaturges in California’s Central Valley and, increasingly, around the world, and her scholarship engages in collaborative Practice as Research methodologies based on these performance projects.