About Us

Stuart -Sinclair Weeks, Founder, Center for American Studies, invited Mark Anderson, author of “Shakespeare” by Another Name, to Concord, Massachusetts, to form a weekend Shakespeare event exploring the ideas of Shakespeare’s Meaning, Motivation, and Message. Thus was formed the “Concord Shakespeare Festival Conference” planning committee. Some people in our group are active in the Oxfordian movement, while others are from the traditional, Stratfordian viewpoint. Below are a list of people who helped plan and bring this Festival Conference to fruition. Many of our planners will also be presenting during the weekend events. Following the group listing are biographies of speakers we have asked to present at this event. Please see our Program page for details of their presentations.

Our planning committee:

Stuart-Sinclair Weeks is the Founder and current head of the Center for American Studies, where he has developed and directed programs on American society and culture for a wide range of audiences, including over 1,000 international leaders from 68 nations. Stuart has extensive experience in developing programs and collaborative ventures involving business, government, and the non-profit sector, including religion, education, and the arts.

Mark Anderson is a journalist who devoted more than a decade to researching the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The resulting book, “Shakespeare” by Another Name, is recognized as a major document of the Shakespeare authorship discussion. Mark has published articles on de Vere in Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe, and on PBS.org, and has lectured worldwide on the authorship issue.

Roderick Phipps-Kettlewell is a professional musician and composer, educated in England and France and at the Juilliard School. Phipps-Kettlewell has conducted and performed as pianist in Europe and throughout America, including at Carnegie’s Weill Hall. He has taught at Macalester College and at the University of St. Thomas, and has lectured extensively at venues including the Concord School of Philosophy.

Alex McNeil received his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from Boston College Law School. A non-practicing attorney, he is the Court Administrator of the Massachusetts Appeals Court in Boston. Alex became interested in the Shakespeare Authorship question after seeing the 1989 PBS Frontline program on the subject. He was one of the founding trustees of the Shakespeare Fellowship, and currently serves as its president. He is the author of Total Television, a reference book on TV programming, and can be heard on the radio as the Friday host of "Lost and Found" on WMBR-FM (88.1, Cambridge MA), a program spotlighting lesser-known pop and soul music of the 60s and 70s.

Dennis Taylor is a professor of English at Boston College and editor of the journal Religion and the Arts. He has written three books on Thomas Hardy, one of which was co-winner of the 1990 Macmillan/Hardy Society Prize, and edited the Penguin edition of Jude the Obscure. He is the co-editor (with David Beauregard) of Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity of Early Modern England and also edited a special issue of Religion and the Arts entitled Shakespeare and the Reformation. He has given numerous talks on Shakespeare, including at the landmark Lancaster Shakespeare Conference of 1999, at the Shakespeare Institute and the Shakespeare Association of America, and in association with the Actors' Shakespeare Project production of Richard III.

Sarah Smith, bestselling novelist, studied Shakespeare under Robert Lowell, earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in English from Harvard, and taught English at Tufts before deciding it was more fun to tell stories for a living. Two of her novels have been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year and one a London Times Book of the Year; her books have also been on best-of lists from Entertainment Weekly and Village Voice . Her novels are published in 14 countries and have reached bestseller status here and abroad. One has been optioned for film and Chasing Shakespeares has recently been made into a play. As part of her research for Chasing Shakespeares, she discovered and republished a new 36-page poem by Edward de Vere. She is a trustee of the Shakespeare Fellowship.

Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a director and independent film producer who studied Shakespeare and poetry at Goddard College and earned a B.A. in Finance from Boston University. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls (2006), screened at film festivals and theaters in London, Toronto, and throughout the U.S. She serves on the Board of Directors of Women in Film & Video/New England, and is a freelance writer for newenglandfilm.com. Her production company, Controversy Films, is currently working on a documentary, Nothing Is Truer than Truth, based on the life of Edward de Vere and Mark Anderson’s “Shakespeare” By Another Name.

Lori DiLiddo studied art and design at the University of Cincinnati, and the Cleveland Institute of Art, earning a B.F.A. in Fine Arts and Design, and has studied film theory. She worked for several years at Harvard University, including the Harvard University Art Museums. She became interested in the Shakespeare Authorship question about 10 years ago.

Additional presenters:

David Conte is a professor of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His close relationships with his teacher Nadia Boulanger and with her first American student of renown, Aaron Copland, inform his striving as a creative artist committed to works that reflect the qualities of craftsmanship and harmonic sensibility Boulanger taught and Copland embodied. In 2002, David Conte published an article: “Ralph Vaughan Williams' Three Shakespeare Songs: An Analytical Guide for Conductors and Composers” in the periodical The Choral Journal, and as a conductor he has performed many works based on Shakespeare's texts. He attended the annual conference of the DeVere Society in London in 2004.

Benjamin Evett, Founder and Artistic Director, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, is also an actor and director performing in Boston at ASP. In 2005, he won the Elliot Norton Award for performances in Permanent Collection, Quills at the New Repertory Theatre, and Richard III at ASP. He was a member of the Resident Acting Company at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge from 1983 to 2003. He has also performed at the Huntington Theatre, Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Hartford Stage Company, and several other theater companies and festivals in the US and abroad including Venice, Paris, and Moscow. He is a graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Classics.

Gerit Quealy is a journalist, editor and actor living in New York City. She writes on a wide range of topics—everything from lipstick to Shakespeare— for numerous magazines, websites and newspapers including the New York Times, Country Living and Modern Bride. She has four books to her credit as well as a performance history of much Shakespeare on stage in addition to various roles on television and in film. She has taught or lectured at a number of educational institutions including Williams College, NYU, FIT, and CCNY in addition to other venues in the tri-state area and the UK, but most enjoys her time as a research historian, spending many happy hours steeped in Elizabethan England. Ms. Quealy is a member of the Authors Guild, the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, International Food, Wine & Travel Writers Association, The St. George Society, the National Coalition for Independent Scholars, and the Renaissance Society of America.

John Stirling Walker was mentored by David Conte as an undergraduate at Cornell University, studying composition and voice there and at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has gone on to become a frequent collaborator with David as a poet and librettist. Their works include two operas and are published by E.C. Schirmer of Boston. His work as an occultist out of impulses given by Rudolf Steiner has provided the inner basis for the presentation, while his training and experience in the theater as actor, director, and writer have been applied in shaping its outer form.

Douglas Reed has a long resume of Broadway and other musical theater credits, and presently continues his service to the world of popular spiritual culture in the U.S. tour of Disney's The Lion King. His love for Shakespeare began in his youth with the Living Shakespeare recordings and the songs of Elizabethan John Dowland. In college, he portrayed Aumerle in Richard II, and later served as Musical Director for the Columbia Artists tour Shakespeare at the Opera and conducted the Shakespeare-based musicals West Side Story in Berlin and Kiss Me Kate at Montclair State College.

Richard F. Whalen, a past president of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, is the author of Shakespeare: Who Was He? The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon, as well as articles in Harper's Magazine and various Shakespeare authorship publications. With Dan Wright of Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, he is general editor of the Oxfordian Shakespeare Series and editor/annotater of Macbeth. Seven more plays in the series are forthcoming. His two-volume history of Truro, Cape Cod, where he lives, has just been reissued by The History Press.

Thanks to our Sponsors

• Boston Electronics Corporation
• The Shakespeare Fellowship
• Starbucks, Concord, Massachusetts