Amy Cook specializes in the intersection of cognitive science and theories of performance, theatre history and dramaturgy, early modern drama, and contemporary productions of Shakespeare. Her research looks at how meaning is made on stage and in performance and how this meaning can scaffold concepts, evoke emotion, and alter the experience of embodiment. She is currently working on the manuscript of “Shakespearean Neuroplay: Hamlet, Blending, and Cognitive Science.” Her essay “Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Approach to Theatre” was published in the December 2007 “new paradigms” issue of Theatre Journal. “Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science,” published in SubStance (2006), unpacks the textual and performed “nothing” that Hamlet finds between Ophelia’s legs. She has also been commissioned to write a documentary theater piece on “race” at Emory University, to be presented at the Brave New Works Festival at Emory in February of 2009.

She has directed Amy Freed’s The Beard of Avon at UCSD, staged readings at UCSD’s Baldwin New Play Festival, The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter at UCSD’s graduate cabaret, and various (off off Broadway) plays in New York City. She has assisted directors Lisa Peterson, Richard Nelson, Rob Bundy, Howard Shalwitz, and Lou Jacob at theatres such as Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Mark Taper Forum, Blue Light, and San Diego Repertory. She was the “cognitive performance analyst” (and dramaturg) for Richard III at Georgia Shakespeare Festival in 2007.

For the last two years she has been a Mellon Fellow in dramaturgy, directing, and dramatic literature at Emory University in Atlanta. She got her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama at University of California, San Diego where she studied with Louis Montrose, Bryan Reynolds, Jim Carmody, Janet Smarr, and cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier, Rafael Núñez, and Seana Coulson. She got her BA in theater directing and psychology (a self-designed individual concentration through the Honors Program) from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

STAGING NOTHING: HAMLET AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/substance/v035/35.2cook.html

Interplay:
The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v059/59.4cook.html