The current Officers and Trustees of the SOF are listed on this page, followed by all former Trustees. The SOF would also like to thank our Honorary Trustees.
Bob Meyers, Trustee and President
Bob Meyers served for 21 years at the National Press Foundation, including 19 years as president and chief operating officer. He retired in 2014 with the title of President Emeritus. The National Press Foundation provides free on-the-record educational programs for U.S. and international journalists. Thousands of print, broadcast, and online reporters and editors went through programs that Bob led or designed. He also worked as a reporter at the Washington Post, including on its Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate investigation, and as an editor at the San Diego Union. Bob also served as director of the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health. He has been a freelance writer for Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. He is the author of two books, one of which won the American Medical Writers Association Award for Excellence in Biomedical Writing.
Bob has edited the popular “How I Became an Oxfordian” essay series on the SOF website since 2015. You can read here how Bob himself became an Oxfordian. On March 4, 2020, he moderated the SOF Centennial Symposium at the National Press Club. He was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Board of Trustees in July 2020, and in September 2020 was elected to a three-year term on the Board. Bob was elected as the third person to serve as President of the unified SOF at the Annual Meeting on October 2, 2021. He was re-elected at the 2024 Annual Meeting to serve in place of retiring President Earl Showerman. As President, Bob is an ex officio member of all SOF committees except the Nominations Committee. He chairs the Communications Committee and previously served on the Editorial Board of The Oxfordian.
Tom Woosnam, Trustee and Vice President
Tom Woosnam was born in England, where he earned his B.Sc. in physics from Imperial College, London. He has lived in the U.S. since 1975 and taught high school physics and math for 45 years before retiring with his wife Julia to Ashland, Oregon, in 2019. His avocation is acting. He has performed in over 50 amateur and professional productions, including eight Oxfordian plays. About his fascination with the Shakespeare authorship question, Tom has stated: “It’s all about the data.” He adds that this is “also a subject that disdains authority as the ultimate arbiter of truth. We’ve all noticed that the case for Oxford attracts a large number of people whose jobs center around evidence – lawyers, judges, engineers, scientists, and others. I am no different.” You can read here how Tom became an Oxfordian. You can also listen to his March 2020 interview on the SOF podcast program, “Don’t Quill the Messenger.”
Tom was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees at the Annual Meeting on October 2, 2021.
Bonner Miller Cutting, Trustee and Secretary
Bonner Miller Cutting graduated from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and has a Master of Music degree from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she also served as an adjunct faculty member. She lectures frequently on the Shakespeare authorship question at conferences, book clubs, and community groups. In her book Necessary Mischief: Exploring the Shakespeare Authorship Question (2018), Bonner reveals new information on ten authorship-related subjects, including the Last Will and Testament of William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon and the £1,000 annuity that Queen Elizabeth I gave to Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford). Videos of six of Bonner’s lectures are posted on the SOF YouTube channel, and interviews with her about the Stratford man’s will are available in podcasts on the “Shakespeare Underground” and “Don’t Quill the Messenger” websites. She was a featured speaker at the SOF celebration of the centennial of Looney’s 1920 book.
Bonner was a board member of the Shakespeare Fellowship before the 2013 merger creating the SOF. She has continued to serve the SOF in many capacities since then. She also serves on the Board of Directors and as Secretary of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, which sponsors the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.” Bonner was elected in 2020 to a three-year term on the SOF Board of Trustees. She is a member of the Conference, Research Grant Program, and Video Contest Committees. She was elected by the Board as Secretary in June 2021.
Richard Foulke, Trustee and Treasurer
Richard (“Rick”) Foulke is a graduate of Purdue University and has an M.B.A. degree from Indianapolis University. He has been an instructor of Cost Accounting. He has 30 years of experience in financial management and is currently Corporate Controller at the Chicago Magnesium Casting Company. The Shakespeare authorship question came to his attention in 1999 and since then, he’s developed a keen interest in Oxford as Shakespeare. In 2001, Rick and his wife, Lucinda, began attending meetings of the Chicago Oxford Society, organized by Marion Buckley and William Farina. In 2006 he became active nationally, attending his first Shakespeare Oxford Conference in Ann Arbor. The Foulkes have twice toured England, particularly sites related to de Vere: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Windsor Castle, Hedingham Castle, Gray’s Inn, and even peeked into the Middle Temple with Kevin Gilvary. Rick and Lucinda traveled to Italy in 2013, using Richard Roe’s The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, exploring the northern cities of Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, and Genoa.
Rick has been an active member of the Finance Committee since 2017. He was elected in 2019 to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees. Rick was also elected by the Board as Treasurer in 2019, reelected in 2020, and is again eligible for reelection to that office in 2021. He chairs the Finance Committee and is a member of the Membership and Fundraising Committee.
Ben August, Trustee
Ben August became an active supporter of Oxfordian activities after reading Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” By Another Name. Thereafter he removed the traditional Shakespeare bust from his library shelf. Not able to find a bust of Edward de Vere, he resolved to have one made, and commissioned a bronze bust of de Vere, sculpted by Paula Slater (see photo at left of August, de Vere, and Slater). An original has been placed at Castle Hedingham in England. Ben, an associate producer of Cheryl Eagan-Donovan’s documentary, Nothing Is Truer Than Truth, also produces a premium Cabernet and a Merlot from August Family Vineyards under his “Earl 17” label. Ben is the proud purchaser at auction of Edward de Vere’s personal copy of a 1565 Herodotus volume on the Greek and Persian Wars – Delle Guerre de Greci et de Persi – which he displayed at the 2019 SOF Annual Conference in Hartford, Connecticut.
Ben was elected in 2019 to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees. He serves on the Membership and Fundraising, Conference, Finance, and Video Contest Committees.
Dorothea Dickerman, Trustee
Dorothea Dickerman retired as a partner from a 34-year career in 1000-lawyer international law firm to research and write on the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Using her legal skills, primary source historical and literary documents and her travels to locations where Oxford lived and visited, she focusses on giving context to his life, to the Shakespeare Canon, and to Tudor law, history, politics and personalities. Her foreign language skills include Italian, French and rusty Latin. You can read here how Dorothea became an Oxfordian.
A speaker at Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship conferences (watch “Shakespeare in Northern Italy: Part I,” “Shakespeare in Sicily: Part II,” and “The Roar of the Mouse: Anne Cecil de Vere & What She Tells Us About Shakespeare”), a regular Blue Boar Tavern participant and a podcast guest on Oxfordian topics (listen to “The Italian Job,” “For the Love of Shakespeare,” and “Begin at the Beguine“), Dorothea also writes articles and book reviews. She is currently working on an Elizabethan historical novel series. Visit her website at DorotheaDickerman.com to read her blog “The Secret Lives of Elizabethans” and keep up with her projects.
Dorothea was awarded her B.A. from Amherst College summa cum laude in English and Political Science and her J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School.
Dorothea was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees at the Annual Meeting on October 2, 2021.
Michael Dudley, Trustee
Michael Dudley is a Canadian academic librarian. Having been an Oxfordian since the 1980s, he has written extensively on various interdisciplinary aspects of the authorship question in The Oxfordian and Brief Chronicles, as well in the fields of education and library science. His many YouTube videos on the subject are quite popular with one – “The Bard Identity: Becoming an Oxfordian” — having been viewed almost 20,000 times. In addition to serving on the SOF’s Data Preservation Committee and the Board of Directors of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, his book, The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity, was released by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the UK in 2023.
Brent Evans, Trustee
Brent has a master’s degree in Asian History from the University of Pennsylvania and two additional years of intensive Japanese language study at International Christian University in Tokyo. He is retired after a 40-year career in international trade. In terms of the authorship question, as lifelong devotees of Shakespeare, Brent and his wife, Patty, were thunderstruck when they stumbled upon a YouTube video of two of their favorite Shakespearean actors, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, convincingly outlining their incredulity about “the man from Stratford.” For Brent, the traditional “genius” explanation quickly disintegrated. It was replaced by a passionate interest in the authorship question, which has prompted years of reading and study. In addition to the SOF, Brent is a member of the UK’s De Vere Society and has visited Hampton Court Palace, Castle Hedingham and St. Stephen’s Chapel in Bures. He is currently researching primary documents for a reassessment of the life of Delia Bacon.
Tom Townsend, Trustee
Tom has been studying and researching both Elizabethan history and the Shakespeare authorship question for over 35 years. A long-time member of the SOF, he has presented numerous papers at conferences and has twice presented introductions to the authorship issue for those new to this issue. He has also published several articles in the SOF Newsletter. A former Director of Consumer Insights (a senior research position) for a large advertising agency, he holds a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio. In September 2024, Tom joined the board as trustee for a one-year term (2024-2025 to complete Earl Showerman’s term).
Former SOF Trustees
Earl Showerman, Former Trustee and President
Earl Showerman, M.D., graduated from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Medical School. He practiced emergency medicine in Oregon for over 30 years and is a longtime patron of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After retiring from medicine, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University to study Shakespeare and pursue his decades-long love affair with the authorship question. Earl has presented several papers on the topic of Shakespeare’s “Greater Greek,” and he wrote the chapter on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?
You can read here how Earl became an Oxfordian. He was a board member and President of the Shakespeare Fellowship before the 2013 merger creating the SOF. He served one year on the SOF Board of Trustees (2013-14) and was elected to a new term in 2018. Due to a serious bicycle accident requiring a period of recovery, Earl left the Board in June 2021. On the Board, among other roles, he served as Secretary (2018-21) and chaired the Conference Committee and the Public Relations and Podcast Committee. After his accident, Earl extended this thought to his many well-wishers: “There is nothing in this life more precious than a great idea to pull one through hard times, so rest assured, I will be back.” He has in fact recovered magnificently and continues to be a leader in the Oxfordian movement. He stepped down from the Board and Presidency in September 2024 to deal with health issues. He plans to return focus to research and writing, particularly in the realm of Greek sources pointing to Oxford as Shakespeare, where he has already made numerous significant contributions.
Tom Regnier, Late Trustee and President
The late Thomas G. (“Tom”) Regnier was the second President of the unified SOF, serving from 2014 to 2018 (on the SOF Board of Trustees, 2013-18, and First Vice President, 2013-14). He also served as a board member and President of the Shakespeare Fellowship before the 2013 merger creating the SOF. Along with John Hamill, the first SOF President, Tom played a central role in bringing the merger about. He was honored as Oxfordian of the Year in 2016 for his work on the unification of the SOF and many other achievements. A beloved friend and colleague of so many in the authorship community, Tom died in April 2020. For more on his remarkable life and career, see his obituary. In this memorial video and interview, Tom discussed how he became an Oxfordian.
Tom was an appellate attorney in southern Florida, having earned his J.D. summa cum laude at the University of Miami School of Law, and his LL.M. at Columbia Law School, where he was honored as a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. He 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. Tom spoke and published frequently on Shakespeare and the law, especially in connection with the authorship issue. He contributed chapters to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (2013) and the ebook Contested Year (2016). He loved acting, performing in many Shakespeare productions and appearing frequently with Peter Galman’s Shakespeare Troupe.
Tom’s YouTube video, “Did Shakespeare Really Write Shakespeare?,” was taped at the GableStage in Coral Gables, Florida, introduced by award-winning director Joseph Adler. Read more here about Tom’s widely acclaimed lectures (eight of them posted on the SOF YouTube channel), including his presentation on March 4, 2020, at the SOF celebration of the centennial of Looney’s 1920 book.
John Hamill, Former Trustee and President
John Hamill retired in 2010 from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco, where he worked as Coordinator of U.S.-Mexico Border Issues and Manager for Military Base Cleanups in California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and other U.S. Pacific Islands. A native of Puerto Rico, John earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico and his master’s degree summa cum laude, in historical geography, at California State University. He also attended graduate school at the University of California at Davis.
John is an independent scholar who has written frequently for The Oxfordian and the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter. One of his most notable articles is “Shakespeare’s Sexuality and How It Affects the Authorship Issue” (2005). In 1995 he published an article, “Dexterity and Sexuality: Is There a Relationship?” in Sex, Cells, and Same-Sex Desire: The Biology of Sexual Preference (Journal of Homosexuality, v. 28, nos. 1-4).
John served as President of the Shakespeare Oxford Society before its 2013 merger with the Shakespeare Fellowship to form the present unified SOF. He was instrumental, along with the late Tom Regnier and others, in bringing about that merger. John became a member of the SOF Board of Trustees and the first President of the unified SOF in 2013. He left the Board and was succeeded as President by Tom Regnier in 2014. John received a special award from the SOF in 2016 for his work on the unification and on establishing the SOF Research Grant Program. From 2018 to 2021, John again served on the Board and as President. He continues as the longtime chair of the Research Grant Program Committee.
Catherine Hatinguais, Trustee
Catherine Hatinguais is a graduate of Bordeaux University (France), where she earned a B.A. in Political Science and an M.A. in English. She later studied biology and ecology at Hunter College and trained as a botanical illustrator at the New York Botanical Garden. Fluent in English, French, and Spanish, Catherine worked for 30 years at the United Nations in New York City as a translator and terminologist, creating bilingual glossaries for use by UN interpreters and translators on technical subjects reflecting UN activities, such as military affairs, the law of the sea, and the environment. You can read here how Catherine became an Oxfordian. She became aware of the Shakespeare authorship question in the early 1990s, and upon her retirement she joined the SOF and started writing abstracts for the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources (SOAR) database of Oxfordian books and articles.
Catherine has attended SOF annual conferences since 2015 and is researching Shakespeare in Italy, relying on Italian sources and focusing on the landscapes and material culture which find echoes in Shakespeare’s plays. She has published three major articles in The Oxfordian: “The Sycamore Grove, Revisited” (2016, freely available online), “Catching the Flood: River Navigation from the Adige to the Po in Shakespeare’s Italy” (2019, freely available online), and “Shakespeare’s Tranect and the Traghetto of Lizza Fusina” (2021, available online for SOF members and available in print on Amazon).
Catherine was elected in 2020 to a three-year term on the Board of Trustees. She serves on the Data Preservation Committee, which seeks to encourage Oxfordian researchers to plan for the survival and orderly transmission of their papers and collections to future generations.
Don Rubin, Former Trustee
Professor Don Rubin is the editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre series. He has been a working scholar and theatre critic for more than 40 years. He is the former chair of the theatre department at Toronto’s York University (now professor emeritus) and a founder of York’s graduate program in theatre studies. Don graduated from New York’s High School of Performing Arts and studied Shakespeare as an undergraduate with Bernard Beckerman, author of Shakespeare at the Globe.
After graduate school and several years as theatre critic for the New Haven Register in Connecticut, Don moved to Canada for a position as theatre critic for that country’s largest newspaper, the Toronto Star, and later for CBC Radio. He is the founding editor of Canada’s national theatre quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, and the editor of the standard volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. He is a past President of the Canadian Theatre Critics Association and was a longtime member of the Executive Board of the UNESCO-affiliated International Association of Theatre Critics. From 2012 through 2016, he offered a senior-level undergraduate course on “Shakespeare: The Authorship Question” at York University. He credits Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” by Another Name with sparking his active interest in Oxfordian studies.
Don is Managing Editor and Book Reviews Editor of Critical Stages, the global scholarly web journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. In December 2018, he edited a special issue of Critical Stages devoted to the Shakespeare authorship question. Don also serves on the Board of Directors and as President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, which sponsors the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt.”
Don was appointed to fill a vacancy on the SOF Board of Trustees in June 2021 and was elected to a three-year term at the Annual Meeting on October 2, 2021. Don previously served two terms on the Board (2014-20), during which he also served two stints as Second Vice President (2016-17 and 2018 to July 2020), and as First Vice President (2017-18) and sole Vice President (July to Sept. 2020). He has also chaired the Conference and Nominations Committees at various times. He played a major role in organizing the SOF Annual Conferences in Toronto (2013), Chicago (2017), Hartford (2019) (see this news item), and the online 2021 Conference. Don currently chairs the Conference Committee and is a member of the Public Relations and Podcast Committee, the Research Grant Program Committee, and the Editorial Board of The Oxfordian.
Julie Sandys Bianchi, Former Trustee
Julie Sandys Bianchi earned a Master’s Degree in Drama at San Francisco State University in 1982 and worked in a variety of theater settings in California, Colorado, Missouri and Virginia, both on the stage as an actress and behind the scenes as a designer, stage manager and theater educator. While a member of the community of Redding, California, she served on the Columbia School District Board and in St Louis County, Missouri, was a member of the University City Arts Commission. Because of her interest in her paternal heritage as a descendant of the Treasurer of the Virginia Company of London, she has over 40 years of experience as a family historian specializing in the gentry families of England and their emigration to colonial Virginia. She has given presentations at SOF Annual Conferences in 2014 (Madison, Wisconsin) on the use of genealogy in solving Elizabethan ancestral mysteries and in 2016 (Boston) on card-playing imagery in the First Folio. You can read here how Julie became an Oxfordian. Now residing in Nashville, Tennessee, Julie is the mother of two adult children, Marieke and Paul, and the wife of Robert (“Bob”) Bianchi, a health-care executive.
Julie was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Board of Trustees in February 2017 and was elected to a three-year term in October 2017. She was reelected in 2020 to complete two years of a vacated term, concluding in the fall of 2022. Julie was elected by the Board as Vice President in 2020, having previously served as Second Vice President (2017-18). She chairs the Video Contest Committee, previously chaired the Public Relations Committee, and took the lead in launching the SOF Podcast Program, “Don’t Quill the Messenger.” Julie is also a member of the Communications, Membership and Fundraising, and Education Outreach Committees.
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, Former Trustee
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan studied Shakespeare and wrote poetry at Goddard College, has a B.S. in Finance & Business Administration from Boston University, and an M.F.A. 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, served on the Board of Directors of the Next Door Theater, and has curated film series at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Brattle Theatre.
You can read here how Cheryl became an Oxfordian. She was honored as Oxfordian of the Year in 2019 and was a featured speaker at the SOF celebration in 2020 of the Oxfordian Centennial. Cheryl has written narrative screenplays, stage plays, and published articles on Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She 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 2018 documentary 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.
Cheryl is deeply committed to education and serves as a mentor to elementary school students interested in media. She served most of one term on the Board of Trustees, from 2014 until resigning in February 2017 to focus on her busy career as a filmmaker and educator. On the Board, among other roles, she served as Second Vice President (2015-16) and as chair of the Finance Committee. She has also chaired the Oxfordian of the Year Selection Committee and has served on the Nominations and Education Outreach Committees.
Walter Hurst, Former Trustee
Walter (“Wally”) Hurst studied English, Economics and Political Science at Duke University and has a law degree 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, including a major article on legislative intent. He earned an M.A. in Shakespeare Authorship Studies from Brunel University (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.” He is currently Executive Director of Families Living Violence Free in Oxford, North Carolina, an organization that advocates for, counsels, and intervenes for those caught up in the challenging world of domestic violence.
Wally previously served as Director of the Norris Theatre at Louisburg College in North Carolina, which produced course-oriented shows, professional shows, and community theatre productions. His teaching experience includes courses in public speaking, acting, introduction to drama, writing, and political science. From 1997 to 2012 he served as Managing Director of the Lakeland Theatre Company which produced a dozen or more shows per year. He has directed and acted in a number of Shakespeare productions, including Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wally served two terms on the Board of Trustees (2014-20).
Ramon Jiménez, Former Trustee
Ramon Jiménez, an independent historian and Shakespearean scholar, is the author of Shakespeare’s Apprenticeship: Identifying the Real Playwright’s Earliest Works (2018) (published by McFarland and also available on Amazon), a landmark study of several early Shakespeare plays and their revolutionary implications for the authorship question. He has also written two acclaimed histories of ancient Rome, both book club selections – Caesar Against the Celts (Da Capo, 1996) and Caesar Against Rome: The Great Roman Civil War (Praeger, 2000) – as well as several important articles, including “The Case for Oxford Revisited” (2009), “Ten Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing: Shakespeare in Stratford and London” (2011), “Shakespeare by the Numbers: What Stylometrics Can and Cannot Tell Us” (2011), “An Evening at the Cockpit: Further Evidence of an Early Date for Henry V” (2016), showing that Shakespeare’s Henry V was probably written and performed no later than 1584, and (most recently) an article showing that The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth was one of the author “Shakespeare’s” earliest plays, written in the 1560s. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Oxfordian, the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, and in the anthology Shakespeare Beyond Doubt? (Shahan & Waugh eds. 2013).
Ramon and his wife, Joan Leon (also a former SOF Trustee), were jointly honored as Oxfordians of the Year in 2018. Ramon served one year on the Board of Trustees (2013-14). He received the Award for Distinguished Shakespearean Scholarship at the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. He has served on the Oxfordian of the Year Selection Committee and is a member of the Editorial Board of The Oxfordian.
Richard Joyrich, Former Trustee
Richard Joyrich, M.D., graduated from Kalamazoo College and the University of Michigan Medical School. He has practiced radiology and nuclear medicine for many years in Detroit. He has regularly attended the Stratford Festival in Ontario and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and has “completed the canon” (seen all of the recognized plays of Shakespeare) at least three times. He was a contributor to the SAC Exposing an Industry in Denial campaign. Richard served as a board member and President of the Shakespeare Oxford Society before the 2013 merger creating the SOF. He served five years on the SOF Board of Trustees (2013-18), three years as First Vice President (2014-17), and for many years chaired the Conference Committee. Richard continues to serve as a deeply valued member of the Conference Committee. He has played a major role in organizing many SOF Annual Conferences.
Lynne Kositsky, Former Trustee
Lynne Kositsky is a poet, author, and researcher who lives in Ontario, Canada. She is co-author, with Professor Roger Stritmatter, of a major work of Shakespearean scholarship: On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (McFarland, 2013). Her honors include the E.J. Pratt Medal and Award for Poetry and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Youth. Among her books is A Question of Will, a young adult novel about the authorship question. Lynne and her husband Michael, a composer, wrote a musical version of the novel which received a staged reading at the 2016 SOF conference in Boston. Lynne served two years on the Board of Trustees (2013-15). She was honored as Oxfordian of the Year in 2006.
Theresa Lauricella, Former Trustee
Theresa Lauricella is Professor of Theatre and Program Coordinator for Theatre and Music at Clark State College (Springfield, Ohio), where she directs and produces shows for the Theatre Program. She earned her B.A. in Theatre and her M.A. in Theatre History and Criticism from Ohio University. She is now studying for a Ph.D. in Leadership in Higher Education. Theresa is a recipient of the DayTony Award in Direction for her production of The Foreigner by Larry Shue. Her directing credits include The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, a stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby by Simon Levy, and Much Ado About Nothing.
You can read here how Theresa became an Oxfordian. She lives in Springfield with her husband, Joe, and their two daughters, Sidonie and Claudia. Theresa was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Board of Trustees in October 2018 and then elected to the Board in 2019, serving the remainder of that term concluding on October 2, 2021. She continues to chair the Education Outreach Committee.
Joan Leon, Former Trustee
Joan Leon attributes her interest in the SOF to her husband, Ramon Jiménez. She and Ramon were jointly honored in 2018 as Oxfordians of the Year. As Ramon became more immersed in the authorship question and Oxfordian studies, Joan offered advice about fundraising, having worked for more than 40 years as a fundraiser and program developer in the nonprofit sector. Joan served two terms on the Board of Trustees (2013-19) and for many years as chair of the Membership and Fundraising Committee. She has also served on the Nominations Committee and the Oxfordian of the Year Selection Committee. Joan feels strongly that the SOF’s best source of support is our membership and that the better care we take of our members and friends, the more they will ensure our success. She also recognizes the value of aid from foundations.
Michael Morse, Former Trustee
Michael Morse attended Harvard College and the University of Louisville, where he earned a B.A. in Philosophy and English. He earned his J.D. at the University of Kentucky College of Law, where he was a Milton M. Livingston Scholar. He then started a private law practice in western Kentucky. Michael’s Shakespearean research has focused on computer-based linguistic analysis of the “Shakespeare” canon and Edward de Vere’s extant literary and epistolary output. Michael served as the first Treasurer (2013-15) of the unified SOF, during his term on the Board of Trustees (2013-16).
Tom Rucker, Former Trustee
Tom Rucker is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Tom received his J.D. from the University of Oklahoma School of Law and a Master’s degree in Taxation from William & Mary Law School. Until he retired from the practice of law in 2010, Tom specialized in representing closely held businesses and the preparation of estate planning documents for his clients.
Tom served two terms on the Board of Trustees (2013-19), four years as Treasurer (2015-19), and for many years as chair of the Finance Committee. He continues to serve on both the Finance Committee and the Membership and Fundraising Committee.
Earl Showerman, Former Trustee
Earl Showerman, M.D., graduated from Harvard College and the University of Michigan Medical School. He practiced emergency medicine in Oregon for over 30 years and is a longtime patron of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After retiring from medicine, he enrolled at Southern Oregon University to study Shakespeare and pursue his decades-long love affair with the authorship question. Earl has presented several papers on the topic of Shakespeare’s “Greater Greek,” and he wrote the chapter on Shakespeare’s medical knowledge in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt?
You can read here how Earl became an Oxfordian. He was a board member and President of the Shakespeare Fellowship before the 2013 merger creating the SOF. He served one year on the SOF Board of Trustees (2013-14) and was elected to a new term in 2018. Due to a serious bicycle accident requiring a period of recovery, Earl left the Board in June 2021. On the Board, among other roles, he served as Secretary (2018-21) and chaired the Conference Committee and the Public Relations and Podcast Committee. After his accident, Earl extended this thought to his many well-wishers: “There is nothing in this life more precious than a great idea to pull one through hard times, so rest assured, I will be back.” He has in fact recovered magnificently and continues to be a leader in the Oxfordian movement.
James A. Warren, Former Trustee
James A. Warren was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Department of State for more than 20 years, serving in public diplomacy positions at U.S. embassies in eight countries, mostly in Asia. He later served as Executive Director of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training and then as Regional Director for Southeast Asia for the Institute of International Education. He is a Fellow with the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas and the Adler-Aquinas Institute.
James was honored in 2020 as Oxfordian of the Year. In 2018 he edited and published a landmark new scholarly edition of J. Thomas Looney’s revolutionary 1920 book, “Shakespeare” Identified. In 2019 he followed up with “Shakespeare” Revealed (a collection of Looney’s published articles and letters, most of them unavailable for the past century) and a new scholarly edition of Esther Singleton’s classic 1929 novel, Shakespearian Fantasias, an Oxfordian-influenced book with which Henry Folger (founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library) was deeply fascinated. On March 4, 2020, James was the keynote speaker at the SOF celebration of the centennial of Looney’s 1920 book. Most recently, during 2021, he has published Shakespeare Revolutionized (a landmark history of the Oxfordian movement and the impact of Looney’s book) and Shakespeare Investigated (a massive collection of articles published by the Shakespeare Fellowship during 1922-36, most of which have been unavailable and out of print since that time).
You can read here how James became an Oxfordian. He is also the editor of An Index to Oxfordian Publications (4th ed. 2017) and the author of Summer Storm: A Novel of Ideas (2016), about the complications that arise when a university literature professor is bitten by the Oxfordian bug and begins to promote Edward de Vere’s authorship among his colleagues. James served one term on the Board of Trustees (2015-18) and has also served on the Oxfordian of the Year Selection Committee.
Bryan H. Wildenthal, Former Trustee
Bryan H. Wildenthal, Professor of Law Emeritus, was a full-time law teacher for 26 years (1994-2020). He taught as Visiting Professor (Spring 2021) at the University of San Diego School of Law. He was a tenured professor for many years at Thomas Jefferson School of Law (San Diego), taking emeritus status in 2018. He has been invited back several times as Visiting Professor at Thomas Jefferson (during 2018-20 and again in Spring 2022). He has also taught as Visiting Professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law and the University of Nice (France) Faculty of Law.
Most of Bryan’s scholarly publications are available here. He earned his A.B. (with honors) at Stanford University and his J.D. (with distinction) at Stanford Law School. He is the author of a textbook on American Indian law (Native American rights) and numerous articles in leading law reviews, of which the most important, on the history of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was cited in multiple briefs and opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 and 2019. He published an article in 2016 about the surprising level of support for the Oxfordian theory on the Supreme Court during recent decades, and is the author of a book published in 2019, Early Shakespeare Authorship Doubts.
You can read here how Bryan became an Oxfordian. He was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2016 and reelected in 2019. He resigned from the Board in July 2020 to focus on writing and editorial work. On the Board, among other roles, he served as Secretary (2017-18), First Vice President (2018-20), and chair of the Centennial Committee (2019-20), organizing the SOF Centennial Symposium at the National Press Club on March 4, 2020. He also chaired the Membership and Fundraising Committee (2019-20) and the Communications Committee (April-July 2020). Bryan was appointed by the Board in April 2020 as SOF Website Content Editor, succeeding the late Tom Regnier in that role and serving until October 2021. He also served on the Editorial Board of The Oxfordian (2017-21) and the Education Outreach Committee (2019-21). He continues to be an active member of the SOF and an independent scholar of the Shakespeare authorship question.
