Welcome and opening remarks from the conference codirectors: Margit Longbrake, Historic New Orleans Collection; Bess Rowen, Villanova University

Emerging scholars use the lenses of performance art, Southern studies, queer time, and a fashion studies approach to the dressed body to shed new light on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, The Night of the Iguana, lesser-known late works, and more. 

Moderator: Matthew P. Smith, Tulane University

Panelists:  

• Lital Dotan, Graduate Center, City University of New York 
• Pune Dracker, Graduate Center, City University of New York   
• Cody Norris, Miami University of Ohio    
• Sloan Garner, University of Georgia   

From the moment The Glass Menagerie became a sensation in 1945, fame took a starring role in shaping Williams’s life and career, a part it continues to play in the performance and reception of his work in the 21st century. Scholars with expertise in literary analysis, history, performance, and directing discuss the various blessings and burdens that did and still do go along with Williams’s personal fame, the fame of his works, and the fame of the actors and directors involved.

Moderator: Bess Rowen, Villanova University 

Panelists:

• Kelly I. Aliano, New York Historical
• Jaclyn Bethany, Irene Collective Theatre Company
• Michael S. D. Hooper, independent scholar
• David Kaplan, director, independent scholar     

French Quarter, New Orleans

What do revered 20th-century playwright Lorraine Hansberry (author of A Raisin in the Sun), boundary-pushing auteur John Waters (director of Pink Flamingoes and Hairspray), celebrated Irish dramatist Brian Friel (author of Dancing at Lughnasa), and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwrights Eboni Booth (2024) and Branden Jacobs Jenkins (2025) have in common? Esteemed academics trace Williams’s surprising hidden and not-so-hidden influences on groundbreaking authors and works in two centuries.

Moderator: Bess Rowen, Villanova University

Panelists:

• Stephen Cedars, Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Benjamin Gillespie, Santa Clara University
• John “Ray” Proctor, Tulane University
• Sara Warner, Cornell University    

Theater director and emeritus professor Tom Mitchell and members of the University of Illinois theater company present a staged reading of a previously unpublished short story by Tennessee Williams, in which a gay couple in the French Quarter muses on how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stands to change the lives of artists and outsiders forever. An experienced editor and researcher, Mitchell provides additional historical context for the story and insight into Williams’s circle and way of life in the years before and during World War II.