A Conversation with Susan C.W. Abbotson

Susan Abbotson started life in the UK but moved to the US in 1990 after teaching for five years at a boys’ grammar school in Birmingham to pursue her doctorate at the University of Connecticut. There she was lucky enough to be assigned Brenda Murphy as her advisor, who gave invaluable support for her thesis and invited her to coauthor Understanding Death of a Salesman (Greenwood 1999). Since 1999, she has taught at Rhode Island College, first teaching Children’s Literature courses as an adjunct, then since 2006, full time as their modern and contemporary drama specialist. She has published five additional books on American drama, including Thematic Guide to Modern Drama (Greenwood 2003), Masterpieces of Twentieth-Century American Drama (Greenwood 2005), which was translated into Chinese in 2007, Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1950s (Methuen 2019), and two others specifically on Miller: Student Companion to Arthur Miller (Greenwood 2000) and A Critical Companion to Arthur Miller (Facts on File 2007). She has twice been president of the Arthur Miller Society, has managed the Miller Society’s website since its creation in 1999 and since 2018, their Facebook page, and is the Performance Review editor for the Arthur Miller Journal. She was the series editor for the most recent twelve volumes of Student Guides for Miller’s plays published by Methuen Drama and is currently working on a collection of original essays with Joshua Polster for Cambridge University Press—Arthur Miller in Context, as well as a solo project, The Critical Reception of Arthur Miller, for Camden House. She has published numerous journal reviews and articles, book chapters, and reference works, mostly focused on American plays and playwrights, with a preponderance of articles on Miller, especially on his later plays and non-dramatic writing. She has also given many keynote lectures and conference papers, and participated in numerous symposia, theatre panels, and after-play discussions.