GII Symposium 2026

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner is the author of Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster), one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. He teaches English and theater at Portland State University. He received the Graves Award from the American Council of Learned Societies for outstanding teaching in the humanities. As a cultural historian and theater critic, his articles about playwrights from Shakespeare to Quiara Alegría Hudes have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. His pandemic spoof, "What Shakespeare Actually Did During the Plague," was adapted into a short film for PBS, and his New Yorker profile of Cherokee playwright and lawyer Mary Kathryn Nagle is being adapted into a feature documentary. He is the scholar-in-residence at the Portland Shakespeare Project and a frequent guest lecturer at theaters around the country. Born and raised in Portland, he received his B.A. in History from Yale and his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. He met his wife in their elementary-school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; they now live in Portland with their two children.