Matteo Pangallo is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He holds an MA in Shakespearean Studies from King’s College London and the Globe, PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is a former Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.
His primary areas of interest are early modern drama and theater history, with a focus upon connections between text, performance, and reception. He also has an interest in dramatic literature generally and the social and intellectual history of the book. His research focuses upon the complex connections between plays and the playhouses from which they emerged – their performance practices, modes of authorship and textual transmission, audiences and experiences of reception, and place within their historical context. As a scholar and a teacher, he is interested especially in the edges of theatrical and literary history, both how those edges transform our understanding of the center and how they can serve as entirely new centers themselves.
Dr. Pangallo's first book, "Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare's Theater" (2017, University of Pennsylvania Press), focuses upon theatrical audiences and amateur playwriting in early modern England. Currently he is working on two other books. "Theatrical Failure in Early Modern England" explores the causes and productive results of aesthetic, commercial, and material failure in domains such as the professional stage, court masque, household entertainment, and university play. "Strange Company: Foreign Performers in Medieval and Early Modern England" surveys the history of performers who toured to England from Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Scotland, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere, establishing the role that they played in the development of early English theatrical culture and situating England's theatrical Renaissance as one part of a global and more complexly transnational, transcultural theatrical Renaissance.
With Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham) he is co-editor of "Shakespeare's Audiences" (2021, Routledge). This collection of thirteen original essays by leading and emerging scholars uses a variety of methods and approaches to explore the global history of audience experience of Shakespearean performance in theater, film, radio, and digital media. The approaches that the volume's contributors take look at Shakespeare’s audiences through a variety of lenses, including theater history, dramaturgy, film studies, fan studies, popular culture, and performance. Together, they provide both close studies of particular moments in the history of Shakespeare’s audiences and a broader understanding of the various, often complex, connections between and among those audiences across the long history of Shakespearean performance.
Dr. Pangallo has designed and taught courses in early modern literature, dramatic literature, theater history, and book history at Bates College, Mount Holyoke College, Westfield State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Salem State University. He has been the recipient of grants from the Bibliographical Society of the United Kingdom, The Malone Society, and the Shakespeare Association of America, as well as a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Scholarship and Jacob K. Javits Fellowship.
Outside of his academic pursuits, Dr. Pangallo is a director and dramaturge and has worked for Salem Theatre Company as its founding artistic director, Rebel Shakespeare Company, and the Globe Theatre in London. He is also an award-winning book-collector and enjoys spending his free time in the forest or the garden.
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