Two long-time faculty members in the Lewis Center for the Arts will retire this year: University Lecturer, former Director of the Program in Theater and Dance, and former Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts Michael Cadden; and Professor of Creative Writing and former Director of the Program in Creative Writing Susan Wheeler.
About Michael Cadden
Michael W. Cadden. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Michael Cadden, who is retiring after 40 years of teaching at Princeton, joined the faculty in 1983, originally as an assistant professor in the Department of English, where he has continued to teach throughout his time at the University. From 1993 to 2011 he served as the fourth director of what was initially the Program in Theater and Dance, working in close collaboration with Head of Dance Ze’eva Cohen. In 2009, the growing program was split into separate programs in Theater and Dance, with Cadden as Director of Theater. In 2011, Cadden was appointed the second chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts, succeeding inaugural chair Paul Muldoon. He served in that position until 2019 and as interim chair in 2021-22. Indeed, Cadden was a key figure in the development of the Lewis Center, which was officially launched in 2007 under the banner of Muldoon’s riff on Princeton’s informal motto, “Princeton in the Service of the Imagination.” The Center forged Princeton’s programs in creative writing, dance, theater/music theater, visual arts, and the interdisciplinary Princeton Atelier into one academic unit.
Peter B. Lewis (left), Michael Cadden and Ze’eva Cohen pictured at the 2007 launch of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Photo by Kevin Birch
Two arts venues at Princeton owe much to Cadden’s leadership. He was among the core team who led the design, development, and opening of the 350-seat Berlind Theatre at McCarter Theatre Center in 2003. He served on McCarter’s board of trustees from 2010 to 2020. The Berlind Theatre is shared and co-programmed by McCarter and the Lewis Center. During his tenure as Lewis Center chair, plans were completed for the 145,000 square-foot Lewis Arts complex, which opened in 2017, providing new state-of-the-art studios and venues for the Programs in Theater and Dance and the Princeton Atelier, new instrumental music spaces for the Department of Music, and a new gallery space for the Program in Visual Arts.
Michael Cadden (back left) with Tim Vasen (center back) and students in Athens during the 2012 summer PIIRS Global Seminar “Re:staging the Greeks.” Photo courtesy of Program in Theater
Cadden’s courses and publications covered a range of theater and literary topics including offerings in Shakespeare in performance, modern and contemporary American theater, Irish drama, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Tony Kushner, ancient Greek drama, the history of theatrical directing, stage comedy, Australian theater and film, films about theater, and contemporary versions of canonical plays. For three summers he co-led the summer Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Global Seminar, “Re:Staging the Greeks,” centered in Athens and Epidauros and developed from a course he evolved with colleague and friend Tim Vasen (and supported by the Program in Hellenic Studies), which included a spring break trip to Greece. He also co-taught courses with Toni Morrison, Athol Fugard, Edward Albee, and Christopher Durang. In the spring of 1988, he offered Princeton’s first course in what was then referred to as “gay and lesbian studies”: “Sexuality and Textuality: Speaking the Unspeakable.” In 1993, Cadden received the Princeton President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, an honor established to recognize excellence in undergraduate teaching by Princeton faculty members.
Other roles he has held at Princeton include director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English, advisory committee for the Fund for Irish Studies, executive committee member of the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and associated faculty in the Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies and in the Center for the Study of Religion. He was for many years a trustee of the Fund for Reunion/Princeton GALA, formed to “foster a more positive atmosphere for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender members of the Princeton University community”; in 2013, he was proud to be part of “Every Voice,” Princeton’s first conference for LGBT alumni and allies. He has often addressed alumni groups on and off campus; with former Theater Program Director Alan Mokler MacVey, he led an alumni trip to London; with Muldoon, he twice co-led alumni trips to Ireland. He served for many years on the board of trustees of Princeton Summer Theater and for three decades as the Princeton “Reader” for the George Jean Nathan Award, the nation’s most prestigious prize for theatrical criticism.
Photo by Kah Poon
Cadden began his career at the Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theater as a dramaturg under Artistic Director Robert Brustein, an assistant editor of yale/theater magazine under Rocco Landesman (later head of the National Endowment for the Arts), and a lecturer in Yale College’s Directed Studies program. He returned to Yale Rep as a dramaturg under its next artistic director, Lloyd Richards, who helmed the first productions of the work of Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson, and as a lecturer in the dramaturgy, directing, and acting programs at the Drama School.
Since 1981, Cadden has taught summer programs for high school teachers of English at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English at its campuses in Vermont, Oxford, Santa Fe, Asheville, Juneau, and Monterey; in 2006, he served as the Robert Frost Chair. Cadden earned a B.A. in History, the Arts and Letters from Yale College in 1971, a B.A. in Drama and English from University of Bristol in the U.K. as a Marshall Scholar, and an M.F.A and D.F.A in Dramaturgy and Criticism from Yale School of Drama.
About Susan Wheeler
Susan Wheeler. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Susan Wheeler began teaching part-time at Princeton in 1999, becoming full-time at the University in 2008, and receiving tenure in 2010. She served as director of the Program in Creative Writing from 2010 to 2015. While at Princeton, Wheeler taught introductory and advanced poetry courses; the team-taught “Word as Objects,” a course cross-listed in creative writing and visual arts; and a fiction workshop.
Her first poetry collection, Bag o’ Diamonds (1993), was selected by James Tate to receive the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. The book’s title was described as illustrative of all her work to follow: vivid and musical, unpredictable, edgy. Her next volume, Smokes, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1998 and was chosen by poet Robert Hass for the Four Way Books Award Series. Source Codes, published in 2001, is a project book made up of numbered and linked poems and collages, rich with references, appendices, and computer source code. Canonical poet John Ashbery described her collection, Ledger, published in 2005, as “a treasure map for those willing to understand the journey”; the book received the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her other collections include Assorted Poems in 2010 and Meme, which was shortlisted in 2012 for a National Book Award.
Susan Wheeler interacts with students in a creative writing workshop. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
Wheeler is also the author of the novel, Record Palace, published in 2005. The work is set in Chicago during the pivotal transitional period between the late 1970s and early 80s and is a medley of voices: a reflection of the ubiquitous LPs that captured the music of the time, and jazz in particular. Novelist E.L. Doctorow called it “[d]ialogic, atmospheric, a situation plumbed rather than a plot unfolded – a Chicago noir this is, and it casts its spell.” Toni Morrison called the book “an astonishment. Susan Wheeler’s deft touch and flawless ear have produced an irresistible work, both fresh and sage.”
Her other honors include the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boston Review Poetry Award, the Robert D. Richardson Award for Non-Fiction from the Denver Quarterly, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in eight editions of The Best American Poetry, as well as in The Paris Review, New American Writing, Talisman, Tin House, The New Yorker, and many other journals. A recipient of grants from Vermont Arts Council and the Fund for Poetry, she was a 2013-15 Princeton Old Dominion Faculty Fellow and has had residencies at Yaddo and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico. Her works have been finalists for The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and John Billings Fiske Poetry Prize, among many others.
Wheeler introduces guest poets at the 2011 Princeton Poetry Festival. Photo courtesy Lewis Center for the Arts
Before joining the Princeton faculty, Wheeler taught in the M.F.A. Programs at New York University, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, and The University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Additionally, she has taught at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago; Poets in Public Service, New York City; Rutgers University; and Lynchburg College, where she was the Richard H. Thornton Writer-In Residence.
She earned a B.A. in Literature at Bennington College and did graduate work in art history at the University of Chicago.
Wheeler will transfer to emeritus status on July 1st.
