Amy Cook is a Mellon Fellow in dramaturgy, directing, and dramatic
literature. She received her Ph.D. at the joint doctoral program of the
University of California, San Diego and the University of California,
Irvine. In her dissertation, she interrogated theater and performance
theory through the lens of recent developments in cognitive science, with
particular attention to the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual
blending. She is currently working on the manuscript of “Shakespearean
Neuroplay: Where Cognitive Science Meets Performance Studies.” Her
research looks at how meaning is made on stage and in performance and how
this meaning can scaffold concepts, evoke emotion, and alter the
experience of embodiment.
Her essay “Interplay” will be published in a special “New Paradigms” issue
of Theatre Journal. “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,”
published in SubStance (September, 2006), unpacks the “nothing” that
Hamlet finds between Ophelia’s legs and asks how the meaning shifts in
performance. Her article (with Bryan Reynolds) on Ben Jonson’s The Devil
is an Ass can be found in Reynolds’ Transversal Enterprises in the Drama
of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005). She has also written about creating the
interdisciplinary class for Emory’s Academic Exchange (Fall 2007).
She will be the “cognitive performance analyst” (and dramaturg) for
Richard III at Georgia Shakespeare Festival this fall (Richard Garner,
director). She has directed Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon at UCSD, staged
readings at UCSD’s Baldwin New Play Festival, The Dumb Waiter by Harold
Pinter at UCSD’s graduate cabaret, and various (off-off Broadway) plays in
New York City. She has assisted directors Lisa Peterson, Richard Nelson,
Rob Bundy, Howard Shalwitz, and Lou Jacob at theaters such as Playwrights
Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Mark Taper Forum, Blue Light, and San
Diego Repertory. As a dramaturg, she has worked on Richard III, Life is a
Dream, and Ken Weitzman’s Spin Moves at UCSD. She has taught theater
history, play analysis, Shakespeare in production, solo performance, “page
to stage,” and a “theatre and science” course, among others
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