Patrick Keppel

Chair, Liberal Arts; Chair, Graduate Languages; Director, Writing & Learning Center;Chair, Liberal Arts; Chair, Graduate Languages; Director, Writing & Learning Center;Chair, Liberal Arts; Chair, Graduate Languages; Director, Writing & Learning Center

Patrick Keppel is the Chair of the Liberal Arts and Graduate Languages departments and is director of the NEC Writing & Learning Center. He has developed a two-semester course of actor training in improvisation and scene development for new actors, the NEC Drama Workshop, and has guided student productions of Ferdinand Bruckner's Pains of Youth and Neil Bell's Therese Raquin, and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child.

Keppel is also a writer of fiction and plays. Stories from his collection of fiction, The Monologist, have appeared in The Literary Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Tamaqua, and the entire collection is featured on the web journal Web del Sol. His story "A Vectorial History of Leroy Pippin" was read by Eli Wallach at Symphony Space in New York as part of NPR's Selected Shorts program. His plays have been presented at The Boston Playwrights' Theatre, The Huntington Theatre's Studio 210, the Boston University School for the Arts, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The 1999 production of his play, The Freeing of Mollie Steimer, was funded by a grant from the St. Botolph Foundation. In 2008 he presented his short play Triangle about the 1911 Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and lectured on “Form and Content in ‘Activist’ Theatre” at the annual conference of the Association for Humanist Sociology in Boston. Triangle and Keppel’s play The Freeing of Mollie Steimer are now part of the permanent collection of the Kheel Center at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. In spring 2012, Triangle will be presented in at the Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline.

Keppel received the Sproat Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.

B.A. summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, University of Notre Dame; M.A., Boston University

2012-10-04