Matthew Davies

Matt Davies is a Professor in the MLitt/MFA Shakespeare and Performance program at Mary Baldwin and a professional actor and director of thirty years standing in the UK and the US. An associate director of renowned Shakespeare company Actors From The London Stage, Matt has been touring the States since 1999. He began his graduate studies at UT Austin in 2004 and earned a Ph.D in English Literature in 2012. While teaching at MBU, Matt has continued to work professionally as close to home as the American Shakespeare Center, throughout the mid-Atlantic and midwest (Baltimore, Richmond and Cincinnati) and as far afield as Prague, where he has staged Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of history plays for Prague Shakespeare Company. He received a best actor nomination for Mark Antony in *Antony & Cleopatra* at Chesapeake Shakespeare and won Best Actor awards for Shylock in Richmond Shakespeare’s *Merchant of Venice*, and Buckingham in *Richard III* and Benedick in *Much Ado About Nothing* for Austin Shakespeare. Matt has directed more than 30 plays, 24 of them Shakespeare, and 14 of those at the Blackfriars Playhouse. Matt’s scholarship puts practice into theory. Recent book chapters include: ‘O, villain, villain, smiling damned villain’: Hamlet and the Rhetoric of Repetition, in *Building Embodiment: exercises to illuminate poetic texts* (Routledge, 2022); “‘The Strangers’ Case’: Accenting Shakespeare’s ESL Characters,” in *Shakespeare and Accentism* (Routledge 2021); and “’And practice rhetoric in your common talk’: How Ralph Made Rhetors Of Us All,” in *Shakespeare in the Light: Essays in honor of Ralph Alan Cohen* (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019). As an acting and directing teacher, Matt’s pedagogy lives in the intersection between early modern formalism and contemporary psychological practice.