Dr. Arthur Feinsod, professor of theater, is currently Artistic Director of the Crossroads Repertory Theatre and served as Theater Department Chair from 2001-2009.  At ISU, he teaches an introduction to theater for majors as well as courses in playwriting, directing, theater history, history of theatrical style, and mask acting.  For the last six years he has been a member of the ISU University Honors Advisory Board, where he developed a “great works” requirement for all ISU honors students. His most recent productions for Crossroads Rep (formerly ISU SummerStage) were A Doll House (2006); A Raisin in the Sun (2007); The Fantasticks (2009); The Sunshine Boys (2010); and Godspell (2011).  After receiving his B.A. from Harvard (magna cum laude, phi beta kappa), his M.A. from UC Berkeley’s “scholar/director” program, and his Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, he taught for sixteen years at Trinity College in Connecticut, where he was the recipient of the Arthur Hughes Award for Accomplishment in Teaching.  In the late 1990’s, he served as Resident Dramaturg and Associate Scholar at the Tony-Award-winning Hartford Stage Company.  During that same period he was commissioned to write an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by the National Theatre of the Deaf, resulting in a national tour.  Other playwriting works include Malcolm’s Call, which received an Equity Showcase production in Manhattan, and Table 17, which was a finalist in the 2004 Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition; was produced as part of the Crossroads Rep 2007 summer season; and was presented by the 78th Street Theatre in Manhattan. His adaptation of William Butler Yeats’ plays and poems about Cuchulain, Sword Against the Sea, is represented by Samuel French and was performed at the Hawks Well Theater in Sligo, Ireland after being presented in the SummerStage 2005 season.  Among the student productions he directed at ISU include Everyman, Endgame, as well as Poison, Poets, and Other Wonders, Feinsod’s own mask adaptations of one-act classics.  In 2004, he directed Leavesakes by Rachelle Martin, which was selected for performance at the Region III Festival of the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival. In terms of scholarly works, Feinsod’s book The Simple Stage, on the simplified stage picture in the modern American theater, was published by Greenwood Press and is still in print. Feinsod is now under contract with Oxford University Press as co-writer of a humanities two-volume textbook entitled Humanities and the Spirit of the Times.  In 2010, Feinsod was a recipient of the Caleb Mills Distinguished Teaching Award and, in 2011, was voted by ISU honors students as the Faculty Member of the Year.