Department of English

Author of thirteen books and editor of eight collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, and an actor and director in commercial and university theatres, Sidney Homan has been named the university’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year. His prize-winning Beckett’s Theatres: Interpretations for Performance emerged from his tour of Florida prisons with a production of Waiting for Godot. In A Fish in the Moonlight, he recounts stories of his youth in South Philly and his experience telling them to children on the hospital’s Pediatric Bone Marrow Unit. Bloomsbury/Methuen has published Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies, which he wrote with the New York director Brian Rhinehart. And for Routledge Press his most recent books are Playing with Reality: Denying, Manipulating, Converting, and Enhancing What Is There, and Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others: Finding the Heart of the Play. His Art’s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime is scheduled to appear late in 2024. He has also written the libretto for the opera The Golem of Prague, with a score by Paul Richards.

With a focus on learning through performance, Homan teaches ENL 4333 (Shakespeare), LIT 3041 (The Craft of Comedy: Exploring though Performance the Art of Laughter), LIT 3043 (Modern Drama—Learning by Doing), and LIT 6047 (An Evening with William Shakespeare), a graduate seminar whose project is a two-hour stage production of scenes from the playwright.

Professor Homan’s CV