Katherine Steele Brokaw researches and teaches Shakespearean performance, eco-theatre, and medieval and early modern drama. She is co-founder of Shakespeare in Yosemite and of the EarthShakes Alliance. She is a professor of literature, environmental humanities, and theatre. She is on the Board of Trustees of the Shakespeare Association of America.
Her book Shakespeare and Community Performance was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2023. She is also 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, Shakespeare Quarterly, 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 co-writing Performing Shakespeare on an Endangered Planet with Royal Shakespeare Company director Elizabeth Freestone, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
At UC Merced, she teaches medieval and early modern literature, Shakespeare, ecological drama, and children’s literature in the undergraduate Literatures in English Program and Environmental Humanities program, and classes on ecology and the arts in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program.
Brokaw is co-founder, producer, and artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite, which debuted in April 2017. The now annual festival is co-sponsored by UC Merced and the the National Park Service, and features a combination of student, professional, and community actors. Films of recent productions are available on their YouTube channel, @yosemiteshakes. She has also co-produced UC Merced’s annual children’s opera, which brings 3500 area schoolchildren to campus every May to experience live opera.