Welcome to Cătălina Florina Florescu, the incoming Associate Editor of Theatre Annual! She will be working with Peter Reed for the next couple of issues before transitioning to the lead Editor role. To reach Dr. Florescu with questions, pitches, and articles, e-mail her at fflorescu@pace.edu. For information about Theatre Annual, visit https://theatreannual.atds.org/.
Congratulations to our members for winning awards from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and let us note that they also won the matching ATDS awards!
Outstanding Books
Ryan Donovan, Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity, Oxford University Press, 2023
Outstanding Books: Distinction for Scholarly Achievement
Esther Kim Lee, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era, University of Michigan Press, 2022
Tina Post, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression, NYU Press, 2023
Outstanding Article
Jade Power-Sotomayor, “Un Llanto Colectivo: A PerformaProtesta,” Theatre Journal 75.2 (2023): 121-141.
Theatre Annual is looking for a few additional book reviewers for the 2024 volume. Please let us know if you are interested in helping out with this service to the journal and the profession!
If you would like to review one of the books below, or if you have ideas for other books (or performances, or podcasts) that would be of interest to Theatre Annual readers, please contact our book review editor, Mike Lueger (mlueger@gmail.com).
Reviews completed by September 1, 2024 (apologies for the short notice!) will make our deadline for the 2024 volume, but we are also looking ahead to reviews for our 2025 volume.
BOOK LIST
Adeyemi, Kemi. Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago. Duke University Press, 2022.
Baker, Christina. Sonic Strategies: Performing Mexico’s War on Drugs, Mourning, and Feminicide, Vanderbilt University Press, 2023.
Boffone, Trevor. Tiktok Cultures. Routledge, 2022.
Bogar, Tom. Theatre on the American Frontier. Louisiana State University Press, 2023.
Boselli, Stefano. Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentines of Paris. Palgrave, 2023.
Chansky, Dorothy. Losing It: Staging the Cultural Conundrum of Dementia and Decline in American Theatre. 2023.
D’Alessandro, Michael. Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75. University of Michigan Press, 2022.
Della Gatta, Carla. Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
Elliott, Kenneth. Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York. University of Iowa Press, 2023.
Essin, Christin. Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theatre Labor. University of Michigan Press, 2021.
Farnsworth, May Summer. Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico. University of Iowa Press, 2023.
Gagliardi, Paul. All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project. Temple University Press, 2023.
Geary II, Fonzie D. Maxwell Anderson and the Marriage Crisis: Challenging Tradition in the Jazz Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Grinenko, Aleksei. Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
Johnson, Jake. Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America. University of Illinois Press, 2021.
Johnson, Katie N. Racing the Great White Way: Black Performance, Eugene O’Neill, and the Transformation of Broadway. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
Kennedy, Jeffrey. Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players. 2023.
King, William Davies. Finding the Way to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”. Anthem, 2024.
Lahr, John. Arthur Miller: American Witness. New Haven: Yale, 2022.
McKelvey, Patrick Timothy. Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. New York: NYU Press, 2024.
Mojica, Monica, and Brenda Farnell. Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way: Mapping Embodied Indigenous Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2023.
Schvey, Henry. Blue Song. 2022.
Shulman, Max. The American Pipe Dream: Performance of Drug Addiction, 1890-1940. University of Iowa Press, 2022.
Stevenson, Jill C. Feeling the Future at Christian End-time Performances. University of Michigan Press, 2022.
Wynstra, Beth. Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill. University of Iowa Press, 2023.
Willenbrink, Hank. Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era. Routledge, 2023.
Submissions Due August 30, 2024
Call for papers for the volume on Ecodramaturgies for Routledge Focus on Dramaturgy series, edited by Magda Romanska:
The term “ecodramaturgy,” coined by Theresa May in 2007, implies how the environment and climate change are interrogated and promoted through performance. While connections between storytelling and the natural world go back to the earliest forms of theatre, it has only been recently that theatre scholars have begun to probe the ways that theatre can be used to address climate change or connect audiences back to nature, as evidenced in the work of Chantal Bilodeau, Una Chaudhuri, and Lisa Woynarski, among others.
This volume attempts to illustrate the scope of the many ecodramaturgies at play around the world. For the collection, I am seeking brief chapters (app. 2,500 words, including notes and bibliography) on ecodramaturgies, that fall under the broad categories of staging and practices, voices and narration, climate justice, and ecocriticsm. Chapters may include case studies of individual works, statements by or interviews with theatre artists and companies, as well as essays.
Possible topics to consider include ways in which the following themes are engaged and interrogated through the performing arts, including theatre, dance, and puppetry:
For the collection, I am particularly interested in chapters that reflect perspectives from First Nations, Indigenous, and other Global South communities and cultures.
Please send abstracts of up to 300 words, along with a brief bio (50 words) to hdenyer@fullerton.edu by August 31, 2024. Accepted notifications will be sent by September 30, 2024, and first drafts of chapters will be due by March 30, 2025.
May 16, 2025
Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
Proposals Due August 19, 2024
Convenor: Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and the Library of Congress Music Division
Committee: Mark Eden Horowitz, Caitlin Miller, Colleen Montgomery, Stacy Wolf
The centrality of women as artists to the American musical on stage and screen has long been acknowledged by scholarship (e.g. Coleman and Sebesta, 2008). The organization Maestra has helped to make the contribution of women and nonbinary creatives to American musical theatre more visible (maestramusic.org); the representation of women within musicals has been analysed (e.g. Wolf, 2002 and 2011; Garcia, 2019); and academic studies of important women who are theatre and film makers (e.g. Greenspan on Dorothy Fields, 2010; Peck on Rida Johnson Young, 2020) have appeared.
Yet there is much more to be done. This special edition of StageStruck! at the Library of Congress will focus on the latest scholarship related to women in and around the American musical in all formats and media, and will showcase the Library’s rich collections related to the subject.
The committee interprets the conference theme broadly; possible topics for presentations may include:
Women as book writers, lyricists, composers, and screenwriters
The representation of women in musicals
Performers and performance
Women as producers, directors, lighting designers, set designers, arrangers, orchestrators, musical directors, and other creative figures
The experience of women working in and around musicals
Intersectionality and feminist theory
Women as audience members
Women involved in promoting and advertising musicals
Women performing songs from musicals outside of context (e.g. Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook albums)
Proposals for individual papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes of discussion) or for a 90-minute pre-constituted panel (three papers + discussion) should be submitted to d.mchugh@sheffield.ac.uk by 19 August 2024. Engagement with the Library of Congress’s collections in proposals is very welcome but not required. Proposals should be 250 words for a standard presentation or 500 words for a panel.
The Library of Congress is home to one of the world’s preeminent music collections. With over 25 million items in its custody, the Music Division preserves and provides access to general music collections comprising musical scores, instructional books, and music literature, as well as special collections that include the personal papers of notable creative artists, the business papers of publishers and artistic foundations, and more. Special collections related to women and musicals include Pearl Bailey, Peggy Clark, Barbara Cook, Katherine Dunham, Sylvia Fine, Dolores Gray, Harriet Hoctor, Yuriko and Susan Kikuchi, Florence Klotz, Ethel Merman, Mary Rodgers, Jeanine Tesori, Gwen Verdon, and many more.
The StageStruck! conference has previously been held at the University of Sheffield (2014, 2016), at the Great American Songbook Foundation (2018, 2024) and online (2021).
Spring 2025
Submissions due December 1, 2024
The American Theatre and Drama Society invites submissions for its Spring 2025 issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Membership in ATDS is not required for submission of an article, but submissions from members are especially encouraged.
This special issue turns to the ideas of censorship and public (or digital) censure in a rapidly changing political and technological landscape. How are these concepts changing? Which histories do they draw on, and how do theatre and performance artists, scholars, and institutions respond to both bans, silencing, and covert pressure to quietly avoid certain content? Cognizant of the history of censorship – from historical examples such as Mae West’s Sex or Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Telerañas to more recent instances, such as the cancellation of a Florida high school’s production of Indecent in 2023 – there has been a rise in both overt theatrical bans and quiet reprogramming to avoid controversy (and legal challenge, in some localities). Further, rapid technological developments have increased both the spread and speed of censorship/censure: platform bans, content moderation disputes, deepfakes, public cancellation campaigns, and doxxing attacks. What can the ideas of censorship and the public censure add to today’s theatre and performance studies discourse? Is theatre more likely to be censored, because of its embodied nature and sensory nature, or less so, because of its ephemerality and multimedia flexibility? How has theatre and performance studies resisted censorship? Should it?
This special issues on “Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today” calls for papers, interviews, and performance reviews that document, critique, theorize, rebut, redress, and explore the changing concept of censorship, and its related concepts of the public censure, “cancellation,” redaction, self-censorship, and content moderation. We are interested in curating an issue that speaks to today’s issues of censorship and public censure. We welcome historical analyses, and encourage scholars to clearly articulate the links between histories and the present and future state of theatre/performance.
Topics might include:
Radical acts of censorship or opposition to censorship
Creative evasions of censorship through activism, technology, media
Self-censorship due to real and/or perceived risk by an individual, group, or institution
Changing modes of censorship due to network effects, social media, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and surveillance
Models of artistic creation and freedom within the Americas under dictatorial, authoritarian, fascist and other repressive regimes and influences.
Censorship in the theatre and performance classroom and in production
The relationship between public censure/censorship (of content, casting, trans exclusionary bans) and concepts of social and emotional harm
Relationship between censorship, self-censorship, and the economics of theatre and performance: what is programmed? What is viral? What is acceptable? According to whom?
Relationship of censorship to discourses of childhood and/or vulnerability
Censorship in the library and the archive
Current-day representations of past periods of censorship
Censorship and international markets for performance
The relationship between cultures of fascism and patterns of censorship in dramatic literature and performance.
Censorship and public policy making based on religious law as applied to theatre
Pieces may be full length essays (6000-8000 words); briefer profiles (2500-4000 words) of artists, presenting organizations, or companies; provocations to the field (2500-4000 words); or interviews (up to 6000 words). Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style, using footnotes, and submitted as an email attachment in Microsoft Word format. If you are using images, please provide the images and captions with your submission. (Please Note: images should be at least 300dpi and authors are responsible for securing permissions before submission)
All correspondence will be conducted by email. Submissions must be received by 1 December 2024. Please direct queries and submissions to guest editors Virginia Anderson (vanderso@conncoll.edu), David Bisaha (dbisaha@binghamton.edu), and Pria Williams (pcwood@olemiss.edu).
ABOUT JADT
Founded in 1989, JADT is a widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal publishing thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas—past and present. The journal’s provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. JADT is fully online and freely accessible. https://www.thesegalcenter.org/jadt
For more information about ATDS, see http://atds.org.
Vol. 46 (2026)
Submissions due January 1, 2025
Co-Editors: Patrick McKelvey and Samuel Yates
In 2010, Susan Schweik observed that “with the notable exception of histories of the freak show, work in disability performance studies tends to focus on contemporary examples.”[1] Fifteen years later, the field’s historiographic impulses hardly seem as settled as they once were. Recent and forthcoming monographs continue to reshape this landscape: in early modern disability performance histories—Katherine Schaap Williams’s Unfixable Forms; nineteenth-century disability performance histories—Dennis Tyler’s Disabilities of the Color Line and Camille Owens’s Like Children; and postwar disability performance histories—Patrick McKelvey’s Disability Works and Will Kanyusik’s The Illegible Man.[2] In combination with ongoing investigations into the disability histories of modern drama by Aleksei Grinenko, Kirsty Johnston, and Hannah Simpson, these are just a few examples of the arrival of more varied and robust disability performance histories that were unimaginable even a decade ago.[3] The breadth and depth of these contributions notwithstanding, one would be hard-pressed to contest the idea that certain forms of presentism don’t shape the contours, commitments, and methods that structure the ever-growing field of disability theatre and performance studies—despite calls by some of our field’s founders for historical interventions.[4]
The reasons for this overwhelmingly contemporary orientation are multiple: flourishing twenty-first-century disability arts and culture movements that rightly demand our critical attention; the imperative contributions of artist-scholars in the field whose interventions necessarily require that they document and theorize their own artistic practices; the access barriers that accompany archival research and travel; purposeful and unconscious elisions of disability and crip/queer bodyminds from archives and finding aids alike; inadequate institutional support for disability scholarship; and uneven effects of an increasingly precarious profession on disabled scholars, all intensified by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic; and the broader co-constitution of anti-theatricality and anti-historicism that continues to inflect theatre and performance research.
And yet, the editors of this special section suspect another factor may be at play: the continued and pervasive separation and policing of disciplinary methodologies through rubrics of “legibility” and institutional bureaucracies, resulting in inadequate dialogue between the fields of disability theatre and performance research and disability history. This results in a pronounced lack of opportunities to reflect on the historical and historiographic assumptions, commitments, and opportunities internal to the field of disability theatre and performance research, and diminishing opportunities for disability historians to learn from theatre and performance theory and historiography. Structuring absences like these are perhaps all the more surprising in light of how the broader field of disability history continues to flourish, including histories of access and design (Bess Williamson’s Accessible America; Aimi Hamraie’s Building Access); Sami Schalk’s invitation to examine forms of disability activism that unfolded beyond the norms and practices of white-majority disability rights movements (Black Disability Politics); Sari Altschuler’s theorization of “historical cripistemology” to foreground crip ways of historical knowing; and Jennifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy’s provocation for disability scholars to begin “cripping the archive.”[5] The tension between these disciplinary developments is an invitation to revive and reassess the historical and historiographic commitments that have long governed disability performance research, such as Petra Kuppers’s deployment of queer historiography to build performance practices that “touch history for crip culture.”[6]
This special issue takes as its project the advancement of historical methods in disability theatre and performance research and the critical appraisal of the historiographic norms of research in the field to date. Potential topics might include:
Disability histories of global theatre and performance practices
Histories of global disability performance cultures
Institutional histories of disability performance research in and beyond the academy
Histories of disability arts and policy, political economy, philanthropy, and grantmaking
Disability histories of the Black Arts Movement
Crip historicism and/or crip historiography in performance research
Histories of disability aesthetics in canonical and classical theatrical forms
Histories of (in)accessibility in theatre and performance
The history of disability theatre and performance studies’ formation as a field
Disability performance politics unmoored from white-majority disability rights activism
Theatre and performance as crip archives
Historical cripistemologies of theatre and performance
Critical convivialities of crip, queer, and trans theatre and performance historiography
Teaching disability in theatre and performance history classrooms
Contributions that examine these topics with attention to race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and class, and/or reconfigure the geographic contours of disability theatre and performance research, particularly with respect to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including diasporic histories, are especially welcome.
We are particularly interested in traditional scholarly essays of 7,000-9,000 words (including notes), but if you have an idea for an alternative format, please inquire with the editors. Please send all manuscripts and inquiries to disabilityperformancehistories@gmail.com by January 1, 2025.
Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Since 1981, Theatre History Studies has provided critical, analytical, and descriptive articles on all aspects of theatre history. The journal is devoted to disseminating the highest quality scholarly endeavors to promote understanding and discovery of world theatre history. Essays for the general section should be between 6,000-8,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Submissions in alternate formats will be considered on an individual basis. Illustrations are encouraged. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (here).
Theatre History Studies accepts submissions for its general section on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please send manuscripts for the general section to: Jocelyn L. Buckner, Editor, at ths.editor@matc.us.
[1] Susan Schweik, “Marshall P. Wilder and Disability Performance History.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, nos. 3-4 (2010), np.
[2] Katherine Schaap Williams, Unfixable Forms: Disability, Performance, and the Early Modern English Theater. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Camille Owens, Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Patrick McKelvey, Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Will Kanyusik, The Illegible Man: Disability and Masculinity in Twentieth Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025.
[3] Aleksei Grinenko, Seriously Mad: Mental Distress and the Broadway Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. Kirsty Johnston, Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Hannah Simpson, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
[4] Ann M. Fox and Carrie Sandahl, “‘Frenemies’ of the Canon: Our Two Decades of Studying and Teaching Disability in Drama and Performance.” In Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsey Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Farr Schiller, 147-160. New York: Routledge, 2022.
[5] Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. Sari Altschuler, “Touching The Scarlet Letter: What Disability History Can Teach Us about Literature.” American Literature 92, no. 1 (2020), 91-122. Jennifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power (edited collection in progress).
[6] Petra Kuppers, Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Pp. 154.
