Harley Erdman

Harley Erdman is a dramaturg, playwright, and scholar whose work focuses on adaptation and translation. He teaches courses in dramaturgy, playwriting, and many aspects of theater history. His commissioned work as a translator of contemporary Latin American theater includes plays from Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. His Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain (ITER, 2016) features his translations of ten plays, for the first time ever in English. It won the Josephine Roberts Award for best scholarly edition in the field of early modern women and gender. With Susan Paun de García, he co-edited the anthology of essays Remaking the Comedia (Tamesis, 2015). His edition of Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la Vera was published by the University of Liverpool Press in 2019 and produced at UMass under the title Wild Thing. His upcoming book, Converso Plays of Seventeenth-Century Spain, about two writers of Jewish heritage who were persecuted by the Inquisition, will be published in early 2026. He is a winner of the Association for Hispanic Classic Theater's Translation Prize.

Erdman has also published many articles on the history of Jewish representation on the American stage, as well as the book Staging the Jew (Rutgers, 1997). His article on the Yiddish play God of Vengeance won the Kahan Prize for Outstanding Essay from the American Society for Theater Research.

His dramatic writing projects include the librettos for the operas The Scarlet Professor and The Garden of Martyrs, with composer Eric Sawyer, as well as the screwball comedy Nobody’s Girl, which premiered at the grand reopening of the Northampton Academy of Music. The Scarlet Professor won the 2019 American Prize for composers of opera. His cabaret musical, My Evil Twin, in collaboration with Sawyer, has toured Fringe festivals in the U.S. and Canada. His current project, the birds the birds the birds, retells Hitchcock’s horror classic from the point of view of the birds. It features songs by Greg Boover and is being developed with director and longtime collaborator Gina Kaufmann.

Erdman has taught in El Salvador and Sri Lanka – in the latter country, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship. He has taught many times in the UMass-affiliated summer course at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He has received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the UMass College of Humanities & Fine Arts, and has twice chaired the UMass Department of Theater.