Tom Regnier, LL.M., was voted 2014-15 president at the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship annual meeting Sept. 13 in Madison, WI.
Regnier is a practicing attorney in the Miami, Florida area. He received his J.D., summa cum laude, from the University of Miami School of Law, and his LL.M. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. He has taught at the University of Miami School of Law (including a course on Shakespeare and the Law) and at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School. He has frequently spoken at authorship conferences on aspects of law in Shakespeare’s works, and he wrote the chapter on Shakespeare’s legal knowledge in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? As Shakespeare Fellowship president, he helped accomplish the unification of the two Oxfordian groups, the Shakespeare Fellowship and the Shakespeare Oxford Society, to become the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, and oversaw the creation of the SOF website.
Regnier’s first act as the new president was to donate $1000 to the SOF.
Regnier is joined on the 2014-15 board by newly elected trustees Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, Walter Hurst, and Don Rubin who will replace outgoing board members: past-president John Hamill, and trustees Ramon Jiménez and Earl Showerman — who will continue to support the organization as active committee participants.
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan studied Shakespeaere and wrote poetry at Goddard College, has a BS in finance and business administration from Boston University, and an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, was short-listed for the PBS series POV. She served as board president of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, currently serves on the board of directors of Next Door Theater, and has curated film series at MIT and the Brattle Theatre. She has written narrative screenplays, stage plays, and published articles on Shakespearean screenwriting and film. Eagan-Donovan teaches screenwriting, film, and drama at Lesley University and Northeastern University. Her new ten-minute play, Veritas, a send-up of Shakespeare academia, had its first staged reading at Lesley University; and her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, based on Mark Anderson’s book Shakespeare by Another Name, focuses on Edward de Vere and his travels in Italy. Eagan-Donovan is committed to education and serves as a mentor to elementary school students interested in media.
Walter Hurst studied English, economics and political science at Duke University and has a degree in law from University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law where he served as assistant managing editor of the law journal and authored several law review articles. He earned an MA in Shakespeare authorship studies from Brunel University in 2013, where his dissertation title was “What’s your authority for that statement? The Need for Standardized Criteria in Determining the Veracity and Validity of External Evidence in the Designation of Early Modern Authorship.” Hurst currently serves ad director of drama and theater studies at Louisburg College in North Carolina as well as director of the Norris Theatre which produces course-oriented shows, professional shows, and community theater productions.
His teaching experience includes courses in public speaking, acting, introduction to drama, writing and political science. From 1997-2012 he served as managing director of the Lakeland Theatre Company which produced 12-14 shows per year. He has directed and acted in a number of Shakespeare productions, including Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Don Rubin is a professor and former chair of the Department of Theatre at Toronto’s York University. He is a founding director of York’s MA and PhD programs in Theatre and Performance Studies and is general editor of Routledge’s critically acclaimed six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemproary Theatre as well as the standard text Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Rubin is president of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, and book review editor of the web journal Critical Stages. He has taught courses on the authorship question at York University and is a former trustee of the Shakespeare Fellowship who coordinated the 2013 Shakespeare authorship conference in Toronto. Rubin has been a visiting professor at numerous universities across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The organization welcomes this new leadership to the SOF board of trustees, joining trustees: Joan Leon, Michael Morse, Richard Joyrich, Lynne Kositsky, and Tom Rucker. Additional officers for the 2014-15 SOF board will be chosen during the first meeting of the new board on September 21. The current board and officers will serve until the next annual meeting in Ashland, Oregon in September 2015.
