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Eugene O’Neill Sessions at ALA 2021

To Be Delivered Online in Zoom

The Eugene O’Neill International Society

American Literature Association Conference

Boston: July 7-11, 2021

The Eugene O’Neill International Society hopes to have sessions at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston, July 7-11.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference now will have some sessions done completely or partially remotely online. There will not be a need to travel to Boston to participate in this conference.

As a result, the O’Neill Society is hoping to offer two panels for this conference and to have both done remotely, either live by Zoom or by a pre-recorded Zoom session which then will be posted to the conference website.

The O’Neill Society seeks proposals for individual 15-minute papers (roughly 2750 words) or topics for 75-minute round-table open discussions on any aspect of O’Neill’s life or works. These can include interpretations of his plays, poems, and essays; historical studies of past events or productions; comparisons of O’Neill to other authors; or discussions of the relevance of O’Neill’s ideas to the culture of today.

Please email proposals for papers or ideas for round tables to David Palmer (dpalmer@maritime.edu) by February 20, 2021. If you submit a proposal for a round table, please include the names and email addresses of possible participants. Accepted proposals will be submitted to the ALA organizers for their consideration by their deadline of March 1, 2021.

Here is a link to the Eugene O’Neill International Society website.

Here is a link to the American Literature Association conference website.

Thank you for considering this call for proposals.

Eugene O’Neill Sessions at CDC 2021

The Eugene O’Neill International Society

The Comparative Drama Conference

Orlando: October 14-16, 2021

The Eugene O’Neill International Society hopes to have sessions at the 44th Annual Comparative Drama Conference (CDC) in Orlando, October 14-16, 2021.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, plans for this conference remain flexible; as of February 2021, it is not yet clear whether the conference will be held in-person in Orlando, convened online, or some combination of the two. Nonetheless, the conference organizers are encouraging people to proceed with plans for sessions as we await clearer information from health officials about appropriate ways to proceed.

The O’Neill Society seeks proposals for individual 15-minute papers (roughly 2750 words) or topics for 75-minute round-table open discussions on any aspect of O’Neill’s life or works. These can include interpretations of his plays, poems, and essays; historical studies of past events or productions; comparisons of O’Neill to other authors; or discussions of the relevance of O’Neill’s ideas to the culture of today.

In particular, we are eager to include papers and round tables on a general theme that we hope to take forward for O’Neill sessions at other future conferences and perhaps eventually to publish as an anthology: “O’Neill in Conversation with …” These can be papers or round tables on O’Neill and other writers or on O’Neill’s relevance to contemporary issues, for example:

  • O’Neill in Conversation with Samuel Beckett on the Absurd
  • O’Neill in Conversation with Aeschylus on Fate
  • O’Neill in Conversation with Aristotle on the Nature of Tragedy
  • O’Neill in Conversation with Contemporary American Woman Dramatists
  • O’Neill in Conversation with Sinclair Lewis on American Capitalism in the Early 20th Century
  • O’Neill in Conversation with August Wilson on Racism in America
  • O’Neill in Conversation with 21st-Century American Politics

Please email proposals for papers or ideas for round tables to David Palmer (dpalmer@maritime.edu) by March 20, 2021. If you submit a proposal for a round table, please include the names and email addresses of possible participants. Accepted proposals will be submitted to the Comparative Drama Conference organizers for their consideration by their deadline of April 3, 2021.

Here is a link to the Eugene O’Neill International Society website.

Here is a link to the Comparative Drama Conference website.

Thank you for considering this call for proposals.

2021 Shaw Symposium

2021 Shaw Symposium  

The Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, CA and online via Zoom 

16-18 July 2021

The International Shaw Society and the Shaw Festival invite proposals to present new critical or creative research at the Eighteenth Annual Summer Shaw Symposium. We welcome proposals that offer a focused analysis of The Devil’s Disciple (the Bernard Shaw play running during the Symposium), and/or closely related aspects of Shaw’s oeuvre. 

Research on other plays and playwrights included in the Shaw Festival’s season, especially those performed that weekend (Charley’s Aunt, Gypsy, Desire Under the Elms, Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse, and Flush) will be considered. Please look over the Shaw Festival’s official website at www.shawfest.com to examine the season programme. 

Generous funding for graduate students and emerging scholars is available through Bryden Scholarships and ISS Travel Grants. See the ISS website at www.shawsociety.org for information about grant applications. 

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, emphasizing the research and/or creative value of your proposed talk, and a short CV to ISS Vice President Jen Buckley at jennifer-buckley@uiowa.edu by 15 March 2021. Feel free to send any relevant questions to Dr. Buckley or ISS President Bob Gaines at gaines@shawsociety.org. 

ATDS at MLA 2022 – Multilinguilism in American Drama

ATDS and MLA Washington DC
6-9 January 2022

Title: “Multilingualism in American Drama”

How do multilingual American plays, live performances, masters, or movements in American drama and theatre from any period offer strategies for historicizing national cultures and/or identities? The papers on this panel may also help us to consider the diverse ways – linguistic, performative, and otherwise – that American plays function in support of past/present/future multilingual access. For example, papers may wish to consider questions about multilingual drama utilizing transnational or post-colonial ideas, such as those of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or other theoretical points of entry, regarding multilingual texts and contexts. Research here may also be mindful of how specific American plays, masters, or movements help us to: consider how theatre may support the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages, deconstruct linguistic master narratives about theatrical etymology, and/or ask difficult questions about the relationship between language and genre.

This panel will respond to questions at issue for the American Theatre and Drama Society’s discourse community as well as the Modern Language Association’s 2021 Presidential theme: “Barbara Fuchs, the 2021–22 president of the MLA, has chosen Multilingual US as the presidential theme for the 2022 MLA Annual Convention in Washington, DC.” Dr. Fuchs asserts: “Our theme for the year is thus contemporary and historical—an invitation to highlight the importance of contemporary multilingualism, while attending to the complex histories and erasures that have led to our present condition.” More information about the MLA can be found here: https://www.mla.org/. The 2022 convention will take place 6-9 January, in Washington DC.

Please send vita and 250 word abstract by March 8th to Nicole Tabor at tabor18018@gmail.com.

Authors of accepted abstracts must join or renew membership to both ATDS and MLA by April 2, 2021. The ATDS statement of purpose: “The American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) is an incorporated organization dedicated to the study of theatre and drama in and of the Americas, its varied histories, traditions, literatures, and performances within its cultural contexts. ATDS also encourages the evolving debate exploring national identities and experiences through research, pedagogy, and practice. ATDS recognizes that notions of America and the US encompass migrations of peoples and cultures that overlap and influence one another.

Dance Studies Association 2021

Galvanizing Dance Studies: 
Building Anti-Racist Praxis, Transformative Connections, and Movement(s) of Radical Care

Dance Studies Association, October 14-17, 2021 Rutgers University/Hyatt Regency, New Brunswick New Jersey

Adanna Jones and Jeff Friedman, program co-chairs
Julia M. Ritter, local arrangements chair

The DSA 2021 Program Committee collectively re-imagines this international conference as a vessel that builds, explores, collaborates, performs, and agitates current practices within the field(s) of dance. Specifically, as our first COVID-times conference, it is important that our work responds to our current global crises. We imagine this conference as the start of a long process of holding ourselves to account. As dancers/scholars, we can equitably uphold diverse movement(s) of care and connection. From this generative yet fractious position, our theme, “Galvanizing Dance/Studies,” calls for dancers, choreographers, activists, curators, pedagogues, technologists, scholars, and those who otherwise engage with dance and movement practices to submit proposals that interrogate the many embodied, disembodied, and colonial laden conversations around the urgent needs of our current moment, by putting theory into action. Knowing that this year’s conference format and structures will be curated to expose, dismantle, challenge, and transform white, supremacist practices of convening and assembly, we seek a wide range of critical perspectives and modalities that yield to future propositions, questions, and/or critiques.

As always, DSA welcomes all proposals that address the full spectrum of dance studies and practice. This year, we particularly invite you to consider the multiple ways your work intersects with each of the following sub-themes:

ANTI-RACIST RESTORATION AND ACTION

  • Addressing ANTI-[Blackness, Brownness, Asianness, Indigeneity].
  • Acknowledging/reckoning with how existing social/political/economic disparities have been revealed and/or exacerbated during the global pandemic and thus our responsibility/ accountability towards those disparities.

(IN)STABILITIES

  • Engaging with the precarious position of the body, dance, and dance institutions.
  • Engaging with histories of instabilities, e.g., looking at the ways particular communities and subjectivities have historically navigated instability through embodied practices.

DECOLONIZING TECHNOLOGIES AND TECHNIQUES OF SUPREMACY

  • Laying bare/re-appropriating terms and uses of technology and technique.
  • Making space for tools and strategies invisibilized by supremacist ideals/value systems, including Black and Global Majority worldviews or alternative concepts of both sustainability and world-building.
  • Challenging what has been legitimized as “technology” and valid “techniques.”

CONNECTION

  • Sustaining experiences of thriving vis-à-vis virtual exchanges of effort and labor, including energy, touch, sweat, breath, and physical closeness.
  • Building movements across difference, such as coalitional work, or holistic/embodied pedagogies.

HEALTH & RADICAL CARE

  • Examining the precarious position of the body, especially when considering whose bodies are essential and/or disposable vis-à-vis systems of health and care.
  • Addressing interdisciplinary connections between dance/studies and bio-science, and also complementary and alternative non-hegemonic modes of healing versus curing.
  • Critically contemplating ways we engage with & respond to COVID-19, alongside endemic global crises (including Black-death, climate change, and migration/refugee crises).

MOBILIZATION/GALVANIZATION

  • Examining and articulating equitable relations among everyone in the dance field—including practitioners, scholars, activists and those who engage with moving bodies.
  • Shifting the onerous labor of anti-racist praxes from oppressed peoples to those with privilege.
  • Choreographing protest and other forms of civil disobedience.
 

Submissions will open on January 4, 2021 and be closed on February 15, 2021. For more information, see:https://dancestudiesassociation.org/conferences

In the spirit of the conference theme and looking toward how we might engage in “galvanization,” DSA encourages submissions to a new presentation format: Hubs. Briefly, Hubs consist of 12 linked presentations, of any format, meeting three times over the course of the conference, for 90 minutes each day. Please note that you must opt-in to participate in a Hub using the submission portal, as applications are made individually. It is DSA policy that individuals only present research once throughout each conference; your Hub participation counts as your singular presentation and will you not be able to submit a proposal in any additional formats. At the time of submission, you will be asked to choose the sub-themes (listed above) that best represent your work, as well as answer demographic questions to ensure that presenters from various geographic locations and career trajectories will be present. Accepted Hub members will then dive deeply into each other’s work during their three Hub sessions, to which conference attendees can be audience members. Your work and feedback can be presented in various formats, from performance to papers and beyond.

Proposed presentations, following DSA’s guidelines about presentation types, may include Hubs, Lightning Sessions, Gatherings, Individual Papers, Panels, Lecture/Demonstrations, Movement Workshops, Dance Works (using outdoor or indoor sites) and Screendances. Individual proposals are welcome, but papers that are already grouped—such as Lightning Sessions and Panels—have a higher likelihood of acceptance and are encouraged. Because this conference is privileging intersectional collaborative efforts that feature research from those working across diverse fields, Hub proposals are strongly encouraged and have the highest likelihood of acceptance. Lastly, although the conference will be held on the ground in Brunswick, New Jersey, applicants who cannot attend in person can apply to be part of remote sessions. Indicate remote presentation at the time of submission.

DSA presents up to six awards each year to graduate students. The Selma Jeanne Cohen Award is for conference presentation; the graduate travel award is for participation or presentation. It is not possible to win both the same year. The deadline for both awards is the same as for proposals, February 15, 2021. For details on both awards, see:

https://dancestudiesassociation.org/awards/selma-jeanne-cohen-award https://dancestudiesassociation.org/awards/graduate-student-travel-award-grants

DSA will also support three Conference Fellowships for Contingent Faculty/Independent Scholars with up to $1,000 for hotel and travel reimbursement.

https://dancestudiesassociation.org/awards/dance-studies-association-conference-fellow-for-contingent-faculty- and-independent-scholars

Additional full and partial scholarships will be offered to the conference theme-related pre-conference workshop. Check back on the DSA website for more information on application opportunities.

You do not need to be a DSA member to apply to the conference, but you must be a DSA member-in-good-standing to accept an offer to present your research. For more information on conference policy and procedure, please visit:https://dancestudiesassociation.org/submission-guidelines

All questions, including regarding access, should be sent to info@dancestudiesassociation.org

2021 Conference Program Committee: Ojeya Cruz Banks, Dasha Chapman, Meiver De la Cruz, Ayrin Ersoz, yonTande Whitney Hunter, Kimberleigh Jordan, Mario LaMothe, Soon Ryon Lee-Hoon, Cristina Fernandes Rosa, Melissa Templeton, Prema Thiagarajan.

Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes

To be published by Penn State University Press, Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes–a new theatre studies generalist journal of short-to-medium length research articles, response articles, and discussion articles–has decided to start its existence with a (hopefully-blockbuster) double issue in 2021. If you would would like your work to be considered for this inaugural issue, please submit your article by March 1, 2021.

To submit a manuscript to Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes (TPNC), please visit Editorial Manager (https://www.editorialmanager.com/tpnc/default.aspx). The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your article to the editorial office. Except in response or discussion articles in which the identity of the author is appropriate and/or required, in order to undergo the journal’s double-blind peer-review process, all articles should (1) be anonymized, (2) be between 1,500-4,000 words, and (3) conform to the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

Research articles

Original research articles can range from focused notes to medium-length articles. Articles can be on any subject(s) in the broadly-defined field of theatre studies, but the scope, ambition, and thesis should be appropriate to the length of the submitted article.

Discussions

Discussion articles can offer proposed solutions and/or problematize specific ideas related to, or emerging from, conversations or debates within the field. Discussions can also serve as a place to crystalize conversations or debates in the field, or to bring seemingly-disparate ideas into a more coherent conversation.

Responses

Response articles are, most often, directed at either the theses of a specific scholar(s) and/or a specific conversation or debate within the field. Often, responses engage directly with the strengths and weaknesses of particular theses or broader ideas in the field in order to either strengthen, modify, or challenge these theses/ideas. The aim of these responses is not to create debates or arguments (and, certainly, never arguments or attacks of a personal nature) but to move the field to a clearer and more accurate understanding of the subject at hand. These response articles can also provide a space to revisit and/or modify one’s own previously-published ideas.

Finally, if you would like to discuss the possibility of proposing and/or curating a “Symposium” consisting of 3-4 related discussion and/or response articles, please send an email to the Editor of Theatre and Performance Notes and Counternotes, Prof. Michael Y. Bennett bennettm@uww.edu.

 

ATDS Panels at CDC 2021

Comparative Drama Conference will meet again in person in Orlando, Florida on October 14-16, 2021. However, the CDC board realizes that it may be difficult for some people to get to Orlando, so we will be offering the opportunity for a virtual reading of one’s paper.  (You don’t have to know what your status will be upon submission of your abstract.) 

The six panelists across two ATDS panels (on death in American drama and theatre) accepted for the postponed April 2020 meeting have been invited to give their papers in October. In addition, CDC is calling for two additional panels sponsored by ATDS.

Pandemic.

Papers may address any aspect of any pandemic as it is presented in or has affected American drama or theatre. “Pandemic” should be broadly conceived so as to include influenza, plague, polio, AIDS, health care, vaccination, politics of pandemic, etc. What might we learn from dramatic/theatrical approaches to pandemic? Did any play address the pandemic of 1918? If not, why not? How did the 1918 pandemic affect theatre? How are theatre practitioners addressing the current pandemic?

Something Else, or I really don’t want to think about pandemic any more.  

Many of us have probably been continuing to work on whatever it was we were working on before the pandemic hit. To make life a little easier for scholars in search of an appropriate panel, the topic of this session is open: anything in American drama, theatre, or performance. (I will use my ingenuity to find an appropriate focus for accepted papers.)     

Instructions. 

 Papers should be 15 minutes in length, written for oral presentation, and accessible to a multi-disciplinary audience. Please send a 250-word abstract as a WORD attachment to Dr. Verna A. Foster at vfoster@luc.edu by March 20, 2021. Please include paper title, author’s name, status (faculty, graduate student, other/scholar-at-large), institutional affiliation, and postal address at top left. 

Abstracts will be printed in the conference program. Accepted presentations will be scheduled in a room with a projector, screen, and speakers. If you wish to use a laptop, please bring your own as well as a dongle.  We do not provide remote control devices. 

If you do not wish to present your paper on an ATDS-sponsored panel, please feel free to submit proposals to Dr. William C. Boles at compdrama@rollins.edu by 3 April 2021. 

Freakery Too: Further Explorations of the Extraordinary Body in Performance

Freakery Too: Further Explorations of the Extraordinary Body in Performance

In 1996, the publication of the anthology Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, defined a generation of scholarship on the topic of the performance of disability. It is hard to imagine any major work of disability theory written since that is not in some way influenced by one or more of those essays, nor by Dr. Garland-Thomson’s other field-defining work Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. By framing disability as a minority identity (with its own cultural relevance) rather than as a disease, these works established Dr. Garland-Thomson as a thought leader in the intersection of disability with performance, literature, and bioethics.

This new anthology will collect twenty essays from scholars working across the disciplines, expanding a definition of freakery and from a common acknowledgement of the particular performativity of the extraordinary body. The anthology will invite its contributors to investigate performative tropes of disability from various critical discourses and will prompt contributors to address one or more of the following questions:

  • ETHICS: What kinds of ethical questions does freak performance open for consideration? Furthermore, how have ethical discussions about freakery changed since the publication of Freakery? How does research into freakery complicated notions of agency, exploitation and victimization?
  • HISTORY: How has the development of freak and monster studies recuperated the histories of marginalized people? To what degree does freakery include agency for people who are exhibited as different?
  • KNOWLEDGE: What happens when well-known tropes of disability encounter, in performance, new critical discourses? Furthermore, how can these discourses and tropes be rehabilitated in performance to enrich the lived realities of disabled and able-bodied persons alike?
  • ART: If no human body is “unusual” or “extraordinary” without semiotic mediation, what is the cultural work of representation? What are the implications of the representation of disability in performance culture? To what degree is there a spatial element in the construction of difference as deviance?

We put particular emphasis on international work, and will solicit case studies of specific performances, traditions, or troupes from Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well as the US and Europe.

As was the case with Freakery, intersectionality and interdisciplinarity will be our watchwords. We will invite contributors from a variety of disciplines that includes cultural anthropology, sociology, literary studies, performance studies, history, social psychology, and bioethics. As editors, we will establish intersectional throughlines that unify the work and enhance its utility to the reader, not only internal to the book but in reference to Freakery.

Essays will be between 5,000 and 6,000 words. Please send a title and abstract of your proposed essay (250 words) to one of the addresses below by February 15. 

For more information, contact Michael Chemers at chemers@ucsc.edu, Rosemarie Garland

Thomson at rgarlan@emory.edu, or Analola Santana at analola.santana@dartmouth.edu.

SETC Theatre Symposium Vol 30

SETC Theatre Symposium Volume 30

“Theatre and Politics”

DATES: April 9-11, 2021
LOCATION: A Virtual Convening through ZOOM  

For the 30th volume of Theatre Symposium, the editors return to a topic first proposed twenty years ago in volume 9 (Theatre and Politics in the Twentieth Century) but reimaged to include a broader, more comprehensive time frame: Theatre & Politics. Ideas of what constitutes the political, how the political is performed, and how theatre engages with politics change over time. What is the historical and ongoing role of theatre in framing our ideas and conversations about politics? How do politics and theatre engage one another in an increasingly mediated landscape? The current moment presents a compelling opportunity to revisit, revise, and reengage.

Politics permeates discourses across myriad mediums. Theatre engages politics and politics engages theatre. Often the lines between the two blur, sometimes productively, sometimes surreptitiously, and sometimes brazenly. From theatrical analysis of the political arena to political analysis of the theatrical stage, discussions of theatre and politics can challenge ethical, theoretical, and artistic considerations of our world. 

The organizers of the 2021 Southeastern Theatre Conference (SETC) Theatre Symposium invite the contributions of scholars, artists, and educators who wish to address the intersection of politics and theatre. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Historical dramas or theatrical productions that reflect and shape constructions of politics
  • Theatre’s role, historically and presently, in the formation and perpetuation of political discourse
  • Political discourse surrounding the role of theatre within a particular moment
  • Current plays, productions, or playwrights engaging with the political
  • Theatrical and performative fomentations of, and responses to, politics and political activity
  • Theatrical work that engages in political discourse around race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, nationality, or religion
  • Political activity that directly borrows from theatre

Keynote speaker Dr. Patricia Ybarra will present on this year’s topic. Dr. Ybarra is the Chair of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies and Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Dr. Ybarra is the author of Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2009), Latinx Theatre in the Times of Neoliberalism (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and co-editor with Lara Nielsen of Theater and Neoliberalism: Performance Permutations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; paperback 2014). She is the former President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She is also a director, dramaturg and the former administrator of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

**Theatre Symposium (part of SETC) refers both to the name of an annual, peer-reviewed journal as well as the annual gathering of scholars. By submitting your abstract, you are applying to participate in the gathering as well as to have the opportunity to submit your completed paper for publication in the journal.**

With current travel restriction brought on by Covid-19, this year’s annual meeting will occur virtually. Selected participants will engage in a virtual sharing of their work and will receive feedback from other participants as well as invited scholars and members of the Theatre Symposium Steering Committee.

Submissions of essay-length versions of papers presented and workshopped at the virtual conference will occur roughly a month or so after the April meeting and will be peer reviewed, and if selected will be published in Volume 30 of SETC’s annual Theatre Symposium journal.

On or before January 22nd 2021, please send abstracts of no more than a single page to Chase Bringardner, Editor, at cab0023@auburn.edu. Please use “LastName TS Abstract” as your subject line. Abstracts should include complete contact information (email, phone, postal address).

Thornton Wilder Society – ALA 2021

The Thornton Wilder Society welcomes papers on any aspect of the author’s career for the annual American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Boston on July 7-11, 2021, Westin Copley Place, 10 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02116.  

We especially welcome papers on gender in any of the plays or novels, or racial identity as they relate to such Wilder works as the plays “Pullman Car Hiawatha” and The Skin of Our Teeth, or the novel The Eighth Day. We welcome papers proposals from both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as established scholars.  

People interested in presenting papers in a session on Thornton Wilder should email proposals to Park Bucker (psbucke@uscsumter.edu) by February 1, 2021.   

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