Michael Cadden

Director of Program in Theater, Senior Lecturer in Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts

Michael Cadden is currently enjoying his twenty-fifth year of teaching at Princeton University, his fifteenth as the Director of the Program in Theater and Dance. He began his career at the Yale School of Drama, where he worked for four years as a dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre under Lloyd Richards and as a lecturer in the dramaturgy, directing, and acting programs at the Yale School of Drama. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, teaching summer programs for high school teachers of English in Vermont, New Mexico, Alaska, and at Oxford University; under Bread Loaf’s auspices; in partnership with Iowa’s Alan Mokler Macvey, he has offered four NEH Summer Institutes for Secondary School teachers. In his classrooms, public lectures, and written work, Cadden has consistently attempted to build bridges between the world of academia and the world of professional theater; in 1995, he served as the Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Drama Division. He has also served as editor of a CD-ROM version of Ibsen’s A Doll House, curator of a major library exhibition centered on the life and work of Oscar Wilde, and co-editor of Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. He has published essays on Athol Fugard, Tony Kushner, Martin McDonagh, Edward Albee, Frank McGuinness and many other contemporary dramatists. For the last thirteen years, he has been a judge for the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He is also proud to have offered Princeton’s first course in Gay and Lesbian Studies. In 1993, he was awarded the University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2003, he happily helped inaugurate Princeton’s new Roger S. Berlind Theater ─ ten years in the planning and the jewel in the crown of Princeton’s performing arts community.