Adele Seeff

Adele Seeff is an independent Shakespearean scholar and lecturer.

Biography

She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, completed a B.A. (English and French literatures) at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a Secondary School Teaching Certificate, Teachers’ Training College, Johannesburg. Then completed an MA and PhD at University of Maryland in the USA, the latter on Charles Kean’s Production of King Lear and the Pageant of Realism.

From 1986 to 2011, she directed the Centre for Renaissance & Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She established the conference series, Attending to Early Modern Women, co-edited seven volumes of conference proceedings, and co-founded the Early Modern Women Journal.

Her voluminous research on Shakespeare and performance has appeared in academic journals and anthologies across the world.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

For some of her many publications on South African theatre, see the entries under "Adele Seeff" in the ESAT Bibliography. (See also her CV at

Besides a number of articles there is the 2018 monograph South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity in the series: Global Shakespeares, published by Springer.