Paul D’Andrea, Professor Emeritus

Biography

Paul D'Andrea
Robinson Professor
Paul D’Andrea

Scholar/playwright Paul D’Andrea began his career at Harvard, earning a B.A. in physics. After studying philosophy at Oxford, he returned to Harvard for a Ph.D. in English literature. He helped found the Institute of the Arts and the Theater of the First Amendment at Mason. His prize-winning plays include The Trouble with Europe, A Full-Length Portrait of America, and The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay and are produced widely. He has taught at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. He won the Morse/Amoco Distinguished Teaching Award at Minnesota and the Teaching Excellence award at Mason.

In 2000 the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, MA, presented his play The Einstein Project. The Theater of the First Amendment produced his adaptation for the twenty-first century of Nathan the Wise, G. E. Lessing’s Enlightenment classic about religious tolerance, opening two weeks after 9/11, filmed and broadcast by WETA/TV (PBS) in 2002, produced in 2003 in Rome by Centro Dionysia and the National Academy of Dramatic Art, used as the focus for dialogue among religions by the Vatican, and broadcast by RAI/TV in Italian.

Professor D’Andrea teaches courses on Renaissance art, philosophy, and literature; views of gender from Aristophanes through Much Ado about Nothing to Sex and the City; the moral vision of contemporary drama; and Shakespeare. He has written prose fiction and screenplays and is interested in finding ways to make a genuinely liberal education more widely available. In 2014, he won the Harvardwood Best New Play Award and in 2015, the Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award.

D’Andrea CV Link

Email: pdandrea@gmu.edu