Jerry Wasserman, PhD. is a professor of English and Theatre at the University of British Columbia. He grew up in New York City and suburbs, started college majoring in Engineering, and ended up with an M.A. in English from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Cornell, specializing in 20th century literature and dramatic literature.

He came to UBC in 1972 to teach modern British, with an emphasis on fiction, and his early publications were almost all on novelists: Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, Huxley, Ellison, as well as Beckett, Rabelais and Shakespeare. By about 1980, working in Vancouver theatres as an actor, often in new Canadian plays, he found himself teaching mostly drama courses and eventually creating a course on Canadian Drama. In 1985 he published Modern Canadian Plays, an anthology of twelve plays post-1967 with a critical introduction surveying the history of Canadian theatre.

Since then, his primary fields of teaching and research have been related to Canadian drama and theatre. Modern Canadian Plays has become the major textbook in the field and is currently in its 4th edition, two volumes of 24 plays. He has published widely on modern Canadian drama, and have recently expanded his interests to the earlier periods of Canadian theatre history. He has also reviewed plays for CBC Radio’s Afternoon Show in Vancouver for over 15 years, and currently review for The Province newspaper as well as his website, www.vancouverplays.com. In 1993 he was cross-appointed to the Theatre Department, where he teaches theatre history and, sometimes, acting for the camera.