Director of Mission
Co-Founder

Ralph Alan Cohen is the Director of Mission and Co-Founder of the American Shakespeare Center. He is also the Gonder Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance in the Master of Letters and Fine Arts program at Mary Baldwin College. He was the project director for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse.

He has directed twenty professional productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in America’s first professional production of that play. In 1990 he directed a student production of Thomas Middleton’s Your Five Gallants, which he also co-edited for Oxford University Press’s Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. He is the author of ShakesFear and How to Cure It: A Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare, has twice guest edited special teaching issues of Shakespeare Quarterly, and has published articles on teaching Shakespeare as well as on Shakespeare, Jonson, and Elizabethan staging.

Ralph is a former professor of English at James Madison University, where he founded the university’s studies abroad program. While at JMU, he won Virginia’s award for outstanding faculty. In 2002 and 2004, he was the project director for the National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored institutes, “Shakespeare’s Theatres, Inside and Out,” held at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton and Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Ralph earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his doctorate at Duke University, and he has honorary degrees from Georgetown University and St. Lawrence University. From 1969 to 1973, he ushered at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium.

In 2008, Governor Tim Kaine awarded Jim Warren and Ralph Cohen the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts for their work with the American Shakespeare Center which they founded in 1988. The Virginia Governor’s Awards for the Arts have been presented only three times, first by Governor John Dalton in 1979, by Governor
Charles Robb in 1985, and most recently in 2000 by Governor Jim Gilmore. The 10 winners in 2008 were selected from 345 nominations, including artists, arts organizations, and supporters of the arts.

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