Oscar Brockett

Oscar Gross Brockett (18 March 1923 – 7 November 2010) was president of the American Theatre Association. An American Theater historian, he was Dean of the College of Fine Art at the University of Texas in Austin .
Background and education.
He grew up in Hartsville, Tennessee; his parents were tobacco farmers. Brockett received his Bachelor's Degree from Peabody College and went on to do graduate studies at Stanford University, receiving both his masters and doctorate from the Drama Department. His masters thesis was about the production history of Of Mice and Men; his dissertation was about satire in English Restoration comedies. Brockett's Stanford Professor Hubert C. Heffner remained his mentor for decades. Oscar married Lenyth Spenker in 1951, herself a writer and a scholar who collaborated with him on many of his projects.
Teaching positions.
His early, junior faculty appointments were at the University of Iowa, Indiana University, University of Southern California and then Bristol University in England. He started teaching at the University of Bloomington, Illinois, in 1963 and remained there for 15 years. The university with which he identified most and where he spent the largest part of his academic life was the University of Texas at Austin. Brockett served as the Dean of the College of Fine Arts (1978-1980) and taught in the Theatre and Dance department from 1980 until retiring in 2006. He headed the doctoral program, expanding it from five students to thirty.
He was recognized internationally as a historian of theater, albeit at a time when almost only professional theater was used as the standard by which to survey the historical development of public performance from the Greeks to the 20th century, covering vast time spans in mainly western cultures. His "1968 book, "History of the Theatre", has been used to teach American theater students for four decades." It saw more than a dozen editions and was translated into numerous languages: even editions in Hebrew, Persian and Korean appeared.
He died in Austin, Texas.
Monographs and textbooks.
Maintaining a conventional approach despite the changes in his discipline, Brockett succeeded in surveying often complex (and sometimes contradictory) research written by a staggering number of specialists: "Brockett managed to assemble a dense but fluid narrative, illustrated liberally with drawings, paintings and photographs."