Abstract

In my paper, I will discuss Diversifying the Classics’ recent work in bringing comedia to K-12 audiences in the Los Angeles area and beyond. Through workshops, adaptations, and performance, the collective is experimenting with ways to translate comedia for a younger audience.


Presenter Biography

Rachel Kaufman is a poet, historian, and teacher. Her work explores diasporic memory and religious ritual, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-community networks of female religious transmission in colonial New Spain. Her first poetry book, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021) enters the archive’s unconscious to unravel the history of the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet's own family histories. Her work has appeared on poets.org and in the Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rethinking History, The Yale Historical Review, Diagram, Comedia Performance, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She was a 2023 Helene Wurlitzer poet-in-residence.