Kathleen Jeffs

Dr. Jeffs’ portfolio includes institutional accreditation, and the Center for Student Academic Success, in collaboration with the director and staff in that area. The accreditation area involves coordinating the ongoing campus efforts to complete the annual reports, mid-cycle review, and 7-year review with the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU). In addition, she works with the Academic Council on matters of assessment, the core curriculum, and program review.

Dr. Jeffs began teaching and directing at Gonzaga University in 2012, and is a Professor in the Theatre and Dance Department at Gonzaga University, where she has also served as department chair. She has taught Introduction to Theatre, Acting I, Directing I, Playwriting, Theatre History, Performance Lab, Internship, Senior Project, and developed Performance Text Analysis, the Core Integration Seminar: Arts in the Community and the First Year Seminar: World as Stage.

She holds a BA in English and Spanish from the University of San Francisco, and a MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship. Her productions at Gonzaga include a Spanish Golden Age play, The Force of Habit, written by Guillén de Castro; Alice, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland by Devin Devine; Jesus Christ Superstar (with Professor Suzanne Ostersmith); Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage; and two Oral History of Homecoming performance projects, one on the experience of returning soldiers and one about the Peace Corps (with Professor Charlie Pepiton). Dr. Jeffs is known at Gonzaga for her leadership in the performing arts, as the Director of the University Core since Fall 2021, and most recently for chairing the Equity in Registration Task Force.

Kathleen’s research areas have been focused on the performance of Spanish Golden Age drama in translation. Her post-doctoral research assistantship was with the AHRC project Out of the Wings (www.outofthewings.org), a virtual environment geared for theatre practitioners and educators to spark new performances of Spanish drama in English translation. Publications include Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2018) and a new translation of The Force of Habit (La fuerza de la costumbre) by Guillén de Castro (Liverpool University Press, ed. Machit, 2019). She recently published a textbook with co-author Suzanne Ostersmith, Interdisciplinary Arts: Integrating Dance, Theatre, and Visual Arts (Human Kinetics, 2022). Selected other publications appear in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo (2021); The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes (2021); in Metacritical Cervantes (Juan de la Cuesta, 2018); Comedia Performance (Spring 2016); in Connecting Past and Present (2015); in The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Legenda, 2015); and in Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theatre in Adaptation (Tamesis, 2015).

Prior to Gonzaga, Kathleen served as dramaturg for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Spanish Golden Age season. Using both classroom and studio-based methods, she taught for the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Sussex. Highlights from her past theatre work in the UK include bringing a series of one-act plays by Cervantes to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, directing Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in the New College cloister garden, and co-producing a one-woman show about yoga at Theatre 503 in London.