Keynote Speaker
William Proctor Williams (Professor of English Emeritus at Northern Illinois University and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Akron) has published widely on English Renaissance literature, particularly Shakespeare, and on textual criticism, bibliography, and book history. He is currently editing The New Variorum Shakespeare Edition of Titus Andronicus (MLA) and Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV, Parts 1 and 2 and If You Know Not Me You Know No One, Parts 1 and 2 for the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, general editor Grace Ioppolo (Oxford University Press). He has edited Macbeth (2006), Romeo and Juliet (2007), and Richard III (2007) for the Sourcebooks/Methuen Shakespeare series, and his Titus Andronicus in this series will appear in 2008. The third edition of his and Craig S. Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies (MLA) appeared in 1999 and the fourth edition will appear in 2008. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant, and most recently he was the Myra and Charlton Hinman Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2003-04).