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William Inge Festival and Conference 2022

The 39th Annual William Inge Theatre Festival and Conference, April 21-23, 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited on the films and plays of William Inge, and/or the works of our 2022 honoree Lynn Nottage, designed for a 20-minute oral presentation at the conference.   A wide variety of perspectives and themes are encouraged.  Papers selected for presentation at the conference will be deposited in the William Inge Collection at Independence Community College, the major repository of Inge manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia. An online archive of papers is also currently under development.

The William Inge Theatre Festival and Conference is in its fourth decade of honoring major living playwrights through a wide range of performances, readings, seminars, workshops, lectures, panel discussions and historical activities.  For three days this year, the small city of Independence, Kansas, becomes the theatrical center of the universe, with visits from some of the nation’s finest playwrights, directors, actors and theatre practitioners, who all meet to honor a distinguished playwright in a playwright’s town.  The 39th Annual festival will be held April 21-23, 2022.

Past recipients are: Edward Albee,  Robert Anderson,  Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick, Carlyle Brown, Betty Comden & Adolph Green,  Christopher Durang, Horton Foote,  William Gibson,  John Guare,  A. R. Gurney,  Tina Howe,  David Henry Hwang, Tom Jones & Harvey Schmidt,  John Kander & Fred Ebb,  Garson Kanin,  Sidney Kingsley, Robert E. Lee,  Arthur Kopit,  Arthur Laurents,  Jerome Lawrence, Romulus Linney,  Terrence McNally,  Arthur Miller,  Marsha Norman,  Octavio Solis, John Patrick,  Sir Peter Shaffer,  Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim,  Paula Vogel,  Wendy Wasserstein,  August Wilson and Lanford Wilson.  We are proud to add Lynn Nottage to this list of Honorees.

Persons interested in submitting a paper should submit a copy (maximum of twenty-minutes reading time and designed for oral presentation to a general audience,) or a substantial abstract with title, by January 28th, 2022; early submissions are encouraged.  Please email to Jackson Bryer, Scholar’s Conference Director at jbryer@umd.edu and copy info@ingecenter.org

ATHE 2022 – ATDS Sessions

AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA SOCIETY (ATDS) SESSIONS

ASSOCIATION FOR THEATRE IN HIGHER EDUCATION (ATHE) CONFERENCE 

DETROIT MARRIOT, DETROIT, MI
JULY 28 – 31, 2022

 

ATHE 2022: REHEARSING THE POSSIBLE: PRACTICING REPARATIVE CREATIVITY

ATHE 2020 and ATHE 2021 showed us that remote engagement offers positive and challenging possibilities for our conference community. The 2022 conference will reconvene in person in Detroit, and also marks ATDS’s 35thanniversary. In this landmark year, ATDS invites individual paper abstracts and full session proposals that celebrate and critique the past, present, and future of theatre and performance scholarship across the Americas, broadly conceived. What creative and scholarly advances have occurred over the past 35 years that have challenged and shaped the discourse of the field? We ask that submissions particularly decenter whiteness and hetero-cis-patriarchy that either amplify minoritarian knowledge production or explicitly analyze the power dynamics in normative/dominant case studies. How can the concept of “reparative creativity,” as defined by Dorinne Kondo, be used to speak truth to power about the structures that continue to oppress people of the global majority within theatre spaces and educational systems in the Americas today? What can theatre practice, history, and scholarship tell us about the relationships between performance and power structures in the ongoing wake of the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and #WeSeeYouWAT? How can theatre techniques and methodologies be used beyond theatre, as theatre for reparative ends that works towards goals such as prison abolition or Black reparations in the Americas? What methods are necessary to make real strides towards equity for BIPOC theatre artists and academics within institutions ranging from ATDS and ATHE to colleges, universities, and theatre companies? And how does Detroit’s own multifaceted history, as highlighted by Damani J. Partridge’s work on decolonizing Detroit, help us (re)frame these important questions? Papers and panel submissions are welcome from all colleagues. ATDS members are especially encouraged to submit. We also welcome opportunities to co-sponsor session proposals with other focus groups. To learn more about membership benefits, please visit the ATDS website: www.atds.org.

The Fine Print: Additional Proposal Submission Information:

Individual paper proposals should be submitted to ATDS Conference Planner, Bess Rowen (bess.rowen@gmail.com), who will group submissions into cohesive panels for consideration by ATHE. Individual proposals must be submitted to Bess Rowen by OCTOBER 15, 2021. Proposals should include an abstract of 250 words, a paper title, a short bio, and contact information including phone number and email. Please specify any A/V needs. ATHE does not accept individual paper submissions, so DO NOT submit your individual proposal on the ATHE website. Individuals wishing to identify colleagues to create panels prior to the November 1st deadline should use the ATDS listserv:

ATDS@LISTSERV.COFC.EDU or the new ATDS focus group page on the ATHE website: www.athe.org/group/ATDS to circulate questions or possible panel topics.

Completed panel proposals (with all panel members assembled) must be submitted directly to ATHE (www.athe.org) by NOVEMBER 1, 2021. Please forward a copy of your completed proposal to Bess Rowen (bess.rowen@gmail.com). Unlike multidisciplinary sessions, single focus group panel proposals do not require focus group approval before submission. Include all requests for A/V, guest passes, or conference grants when you submit your panel proposal. ATHE permits two conference presentations per participant.

Multidisciplinary session proposals must be sponsored by a minimum of two (2) ATHE Focus Groups and/or Committees. It is your responsibility to contact each Focus Group Conference Planner or Committee Chair prior to the submission deadline to gain approval of all sponsoring Focus Groups and/or Committees. For contact information and additional details on proposal submissions visit ATHE’s website: www.athe.org and click on the “Conference” tab.

Rethinking the Biography of the Actor and the Entertainer

Rethinking the Biography of the Actor and the Entertainer

essay cluster curated by Beth Holmgren (Duke University)

Whereas biography has been characterized as one of the least prescribed and most undertheorized of the genres in the literary canon, the biographies of both serious actors and popular entertainers have long remained formulaic and simplistic in recycling the celebrity and marketability of their subjects. The vast majority of biographies being produced about contemporary actors exploit the binarism of the star’s image, repeating critical hyperboles about their performances while dishing gossip about their intimate lives. Those biographers who choose the tougher project of writing about stars past (sometimes stars who dimmed well before the invention of film and recording technology) tend to follow the same pattern: They labor to resurrect the past glories of their subjects’ famed roles as well as the past scandals of the stars’ private misbehavior. How else are writers to interest today’s readers in their performers’ once renowned legacy and public personae?

We dedicate this special issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny to consider other more analytical, contextualized, yet still engaging approaches to writing performers’ biographies. We invite submissions from any scholars who have either written a substantial biography of an actor or entertainer or are preparing to do so and ask them to reflect critically on their practice in their essays. Your biographical subject need not be Polish, but the biography you wrote/are in the process of writing must be analytical, well-researched, and published/intended for publication by an academic or non-mass market press. We welcome biographers at any stage in their careers. The more diverse this issue is in terms of subjects and contributors, the more useful it will be for readers and future biographers. The languages of this issue, as for all issues of Pamiętnik Teatralny, are Polish and English.

Your article must respond to the first question and engage with some of the following questions insofar as they are relevant to your work:

1. What compelled you to showcase and analyze your subject for the reading public? Did you choose an actor regarded as serious, a popular entertainer, or a performer who played/has played in a range of different venues (stage, film, television, cabaret, nightclub, etc.)?

2. What reading public did/do you have in mind for this biography?

3. What sort of primary sources were/are you able to locate on your subject (e.g., memoirs by actor, family members, associates; correspondence; reviews; recorded or filmed performances; published or filmed interviews; material belongings; even former homes and haunts)? Given that many actors compose their memoirs upon their retirement to exploit their celebrity and reprise a written performance of the star image, how did you/do you intend to incorporate their first-person testimony, still maintaining a critical distance? If you were/are missing important primary sources, how did/do you plan to deal with this lacuna?

4. How did/do your subject and its primary sources shape the plot or analytical design of your biography? Did/do the works of specific theater scholars or examples of certain actor biographies inform your approach? Did you utilize paradigms such as the one proposed by Viv Gardner (2007): a “polyfocal” reading that situates the subjects and their works in their specific sociocultural and theatrical contexts and addresses the influence of both the market and extant genres (e.g., epistolary novels, Bildungsroman) on the subjects’ self-presentation?

[1] If your subject is a popular performer, did/do you find useful approaches in relatively recent biographies that underscore how such performers modeled and made desirable new social types and behaviors? (See, among many others, Andrew L. Erdman, Ruth Feldstein, Neal Gabler, Susan A. Glenn, Shane Vogel, and David Weinstein, among many others.[2])

5. One of the primary challenges facing biographers of actors and entertainers is conveying their subject’s embodied, enacted, ephemeral art – the liveness and in-the-moment impact of their performances. How did/will you try to convey this art effectively?

6. What other challenges confronted/are confronting you in writing your biography? What advice would you like to share with future biographers of the actor/entertainer?

This issue will be published in June/July 2022. A special committee made up of members of the editorial board, Ewa Partyga and Emilia Olechnowicz, as well as the curator, Beth Holmgren, will decide on contributors based on their review of submitted abstracts.

To be considered, your abstract should summarize your essay in 500 words and be sent to pamietnik.teatralny@gmail.com no later than September 10, 2021. In your abstract, specify if your completed text will be 6000 words or 3000 words, the journal’s customary long and short article lengths. If you have any questions, please send these to pamietnik.teatralny@gmail.com.

Once we have chosen the articles to be published in this issue, the contributors should be ready to submit their full texts—either 3000 or 6000 words—by December 30, 2021. The accepted submissions will then undergo the double-blind peer review process according to journal policy. Please refer to the journal website for formatting guidelines: https:// czasopisma.ispan.pl/index.php/pt/dlaautora.To the right on this site, you can click on your preferred language – English or Polish.

JADT Special Issue – Asian American Dramaturgies

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 

Special Issue: Asian American Dramaturgies

Spring 2022 

Call for Submissions 

 

“Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends.” 

– Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity

 

The American Theatre and Drama Society’s 2022 special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre attends to the urgency of Asian Americanist critique in theatre and performance studies given the increased visibility of anti-Asian misogynist xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic. What can Asian American dramaturgies do? What can we do with Asian American dramaturgies? Instead of reducing racism to individual, exceptional, and newfound hate, Asian American dramaturgies invite us to investigate longer histories of violence from the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre in 1871 to yellowface today. They provide context for how performance has scripted structural inequalities from economic exploitation to health disparities and narratives from war and genocide to incarceration and deportation. They theorize Asian Americanness as a racial formation and political identity of pan-Asian solidarity. They seek and complicate communal joy in representation. And they imagine new worlds on stage and beyond the theatre.

This special issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies” calls for proposals to redress the dearth of scholarship on Asian American theatre and performance studies in JADT. Dramaturgs research history, interpret plays, analyze dramatic structure, ask questions, teach, feel deeply, collaborate, mediate, and advocate for others. In her book Worldmaking, Dorinne Kondo speaks to the reparative work that dramaturgs perform to raze systemic white supremacy and reinvigorate artists and audiences of color. Asian American dramaturgies do this care work toward anti-racist, liberatory possibilities.

Submissions may take up subjects such as:

  • Histories of Asian American theatre institutions, playwrights, and performances from the Asian American Performers Action Coalition to Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s Draw the Circle
  • Asian Americans in historically white U.S. regional theatres
  • Asian Americanist archival practices
  • Reflections on the foundation of Asian American theatre and performance studies by scholars like James S. Moy, Josephine Lee, and Esther Kim Lee, and the state of the field today
  • Asian American artistic approaches
  • Teaching Asian American drama from the classroom to student troupes
  • Theories including Lisa Lowe’s immigrant acts, Karen Shimakawa’s national abjection, Lucy Burns’s puro arte, Ju Yon Kim’s racial mundane, and Iyko Day’s alien capital
  • Asian American audiences and affects
  • Casting (and not casting) Asian American actors
  • Protests of yellowface, Orientalism, and anti-Asian racism
  • Impact of COVID-19 on Asian American performances
  • Solidarities with political movements including Black, trans, and queer abolition; Latinx workers’ and immigrants’ rights; Palestinian liberation; and Native decolonization

Inspired by the 2021 “Milestones in Black Theatre” JADT special issue edited by Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather Nathans, we welcome short submissions in a variety of formats rather than standard-length articles in order to include more voices and challenge the typical academic journal template. Authors may submit interviews, manifestos, dramaturgs’ notes, and short essays ranging from 800-2500 words as well as roundtables up to 5000 words in length.Manuscripts should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, use endnotes, and be submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word format.

Authors do not need to be members of the American Theatre and Drama Society, but submissions from members are especially encouraged. For more information about ATDS and to join the Society, see www.atds.org.

Please direct submissions and questions to guest editor Donatella Galella at Galella@ucr.edu. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2021. 

The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill

The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill Longing and Belonging Suffolk University Boston, Massachusetts July 6-9, 2022

As we head into the 20s of the 21 st century, we mark the centennials of key O’Neill plays that introduced his voice to a wider audience. Beyond the Horizon premiered on Broadway in 1920 and ushered in a uniquely American tragic form. The Emperor Jones also opened on Broadway in 1920 and was a work that both experimented with emerging expressionist theatrical techniques and broke the color line on Broadway. The Hairy Ape, staged by the Provincetown Players in 1922, criticized capitalist structures and pointed out the fragility and fallibility of the American Dream.

Tapping into the zeitgeist of the early 1920s, a time when rapid changes in technology and industry, sudden shifts in workplace environments, and clashes between and among individuals based on differences of race, class, and gender swirled around the cultural and societal ether, O’Neill’s works reflected the longing and belonging that permeated the contemporary culture. A full century later, as we make our way out of the isolation and separation that pervaded the world-wide pandemic, a conference on longing and belonging seems to be not only fitting, but essential to the Eugene O’Neill Society’s participation in the current cultural conversation.

This conference calls for papers that interrogate and investigate notions of longing, the horizon beyond, the unattainable, the pipe dream, and/or belonging, fitting in, feeling “at home.” And, in turn, we invite considerations of those who feel they can never belong: the alienated, the displaced, the misbegotten.

During this fertile and prolific period in O’Neill’s writing life, Exorcism and “Anna Christie” also premiered and his willingness to experiment was taking off, so we seek participants who wish to explore O’Neill’s own experimentation in his lifetime as well as experimental approaches to O’Neill in our own time. We invite scholars, historians, directors, playwrights, actors, and teachers to examine new ways of engaging O’Neill, thereby expanding our own scholarly and pedagogical horizons.

Boston’s geography is central to the conference, just as it was foundational to O’Neill’s development as a playwright. O’Neill was tethered not only to Boston/Cambridge (his brief early stint at Harvard; his later stay at the Shelton Hotel, now part of Boston University; and his eternal rest at Forest Hills Cemetery), but also to spaces beyond Boston/Cambridge, including Marblehead to the north, and, of course, Provincetown to the southeast.

We invite proposals on all aspects of O’Neill’s work, whether specifically related to the conference theme (longing and belonging) or locale (Boston, New England) or not. We note that the 11 th International Conference was initially scheduled for the summer of 2020, under the theme “Beyond the Horizon” but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Accepted participants in that conference are invited to submit the same proposals to the 2022 conference, if you feel that yours fits within the new theme. We will make every effort (subject to issues of capacity) to include previously accepted proposals.

Proposals are invited in these formats:

1. Individual papers of 15-20 minutes

2. Panel presentations on a particular theme with three speakers, none to exceed 20 minutes

3. Roundtable discussions of 75 minutes on a particular topic, with 3-6 participants

4. Creative works such as performances, staged readings, or videographic essays

5. Working Groups with an eye toward publication (possibly with the Eugene O’Neill Review)

6. Graduate Student and Advanced Undergraduate student presentations

7. Ted-talk style presentations

Please send a 250-word proposal, including name, academic affiliation, mail and email addresses, paper title, a brief abstract, biography (of 100 words), and desired format. Panel or roundtable proposals should include this information for all participants, with brief abstracts for panels or participant bios for roundtables.

In the interest of making the conference more accessible to a wide variety of participants, the Eugene O’Neill Society has created a fund to support graduate students, theatre artists, contingent faculty, and others who do not receive sufficient institutional support. Applicants can apply for an award of up to $250 for the conference fee and up to $250 for travel to the conference, for a maximum total of $500. The Fred Wilkins Travel Award for graduate students (up to $500) is also available. 

Send proposals by September 1, 2021 to Herman Farrell at Herman.Farrell3@uky.edu with the subject heading: “O’Neill Conference.” If you are considering something experimental and wish to consult more about an idea before the deadline, we encourage you to write to Herman Farrell.

Conference Organizers: Steven Bloom and Beth Wynstra Conference Session Planner: Herman Farrell

 

‘PRESENCE’ – TDR Consortium Special Issue by Yale University

‘PRESENCE’ – TDR Consortium Special Issue by Yale University Coedited by Kimberly Jannarone, Elise Morrison, and Tavia Nyong’o

For nearly three decades, scholars have debated whether performance is constituted by the mutual presence of live bodies in coterminous time and space. Since its inception, this debate has been influenced by poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, phenomenology and critical race theory. For these discourses, performance can critically interrogate the metaphysics of presence by confusing, displacing, or reframing the conditions by which we distinguish it from absence. Consequently, performance has often been identified as an elusive mode of presence that challenges all manner of culturally constructed binaries: appearance and disappearance, liveness and mediatization, archival remains and embodied memory, reality and illusion, representation and action, selfsameness and otherness, etc. If performance has been construed as the deconstructive practice par excellence, then privileging co-presence has sometimes been construed as naïve and even passé. 

However, if it is true that we become most conscious of presence when we encounter its ruptures, traces, and other expressions of absence, then the suspended animation of pandemic life has been something of a prolonged confrontation with what makes co-presence feel so vital.  As Walter Benjamin observed in his essay on mechanical reproduction, “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence,” and the way in which we perceive presence now has received a shock of world historical proportions. As we enter the third decade of the new millennium, we have a rare opportunity to reflect on what our senses have shown us and to re-examine past and future directions for thinking and feeling presence in our field in light of historical experience. What, if any, real distinctions between presence and absence, liveness and mediation, etc., have been too hastily elided or dismissed as nominal? What ways of interrogating presence have taken on greater urgency? For instance, ‘lockdown’ has made explicit for many the affective attachments and ethical commitments that attend particular modes of being-present, along with their cultural and sociopolitical contexts. Fleshly co-presence has evoked contradictory feelings of desire and anxiety. Presence is alternatively demanded as a human need and civic right, or else avoided as a threat to public health.  How do we query these biopolitical aspects of presence and how might they alter the discourses that have historically framed presence as a subject for performance studies? 

We invite essays from scholars and artists that critically engage with presence in ways that might include but are not limited to:

  •  The (re-)construction of “presence effects” in digital, interactive, immersive, transmedia, or VR performance
  • The mediation of historical performances across archives (eg, digital, community, museal, library archives, etc.), documentary mediums (eg, printed matter, objects, photography, tape, digital videos, etc.), and modes of public display (eg, exhibitions, webpages, memorials, cultural heritage sites, etc.)
  • The structuring of everyday performances of presence through the dramaturgy of social forms
  • History, theory, and practices of stage presence, charisma, and performance of auratic singularity
  • Indigenous, Black, POC, decolonial and non-Western conceptions/practices of presence
  • The affective constitution of presence in theory and practice; presence as an affect-laden object of repulsion and attraction.
  • Presence as socio-political strategy or ethical appeal; copresence as collaboration and conflict; gesture of care, confrontation with otherness, symbolic display of solidarity or dissent, means of producing visibility in the public sphere for marginalized identities
  • The prohibition of copresence; presence as transgression of law or social norms
  • Conceptions of presence that critique the privileging of certain senses (eg, ocularcentric or phonocentric ideas of presence); readings of presence through a disability studies lens
  • Critiques of poststructuralist analyses of presence, or arguments for the recuperation of ontological/materialist arguments for non-mediatized presence (perhaps taking into account arguments of new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology)
  • Technologically-mediated intimacy and sexuality
  • The presence of non-human agents (from viruses, to animals life, weather patterns, algorithms, and landfills) and their material influence on live performance’s continued presence as a cultural practice
  • Hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and the performative presence of mental objects in altered states of consciousness
  • The commodification of presence in the experience and service economies
 
For submissions and inquiries, please email evan.hill@yale.edu. 

Submissions should be approximately 9–12,000 words, and be sent for consideration by 15 September, 2021.

Thornton Wilder Journal Special Issue: Teaching Wilder 

Thornton Wilder Journal Special Issue: Teaching Wilder 

Looking for articles about all levels: graduate, undergraduate, high school; and from both literary and theatrical perspectives.

The article should be approximately 10-12 pages in length, and need not be a scholarly piece but rather more of a personal essay; the deadline is January 15, 2022.  Please email submissions or queries to Jackson R. Bryer:  jbryer@umd.edu
 
In addition to articles on teaching Wilder’s full-length and one-act plays, we are also interested in articles on teaching Wilder’s novels, and the Alfred Hitchcock film Shadow of a Doubt for which Wilder wrote the first draft of the screenplay, or any other Wilder-related teaching.

MLA 2022 – Circum-Atlantic Drama and Performance

“Circum-Atlantic Drama and Performance”

The Drama and Performance Forum of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Sponsored Session

2022 MLA Annual Convention in Washington, DC from January 6 to 9, 2022.

We welcome proposals on diverse types of drama and performance in the circum-Atlantic world during any period and are especially interested in topics that foreground sites outside of the U.S. and Britain. Some possible questions: How were performance traditions that developed in the (former) colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and the UK circulated and re-staged in Europe and/or Africa? How were indigenous, Afrodescendant, and other identities (such as Chinese or Indian) conscripted into performative acts of surrogation? What does it mean to speak of circum-Atlantic performance in the digital era? And do changes in the cartography of global capitalism require us to revise the circum-Atlantic script? This panel will be held in conjunction with a roundtable devoted to the 25th anniversary of Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance.

Please submit brief bios and 250-word abstracts by March 15, 2021 to Sarah J. Townsend (sjt18@psu.edu).

 

Special Issue of Performance Matters: The Syllabus is the Thing

Special Issue of Performance Matters 

Edited by Karin Shankar and Julia Steinmetz

The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom

 What does a performance studies syllabus instantiate or call into being in the classroom? As an interdiscipline, performance studies has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. As such, performance studies syllabi may function as performance scores, performative texts, archives of pedagogical practice, and finally, as the material of our performance as teachers. Indeed, the classroom, for many of us, is our most prolific and durational performance site. These iterative classroom performances rely on scripts as well as improvisational practices, with new forms and constellations emerging from the tried and true. The classroom is then a black box: a space for the staging of collective process, of dialogical exchange, and of inquiry itself as a performance form. It is also a black box in another sense: the classroom walls obscure its inner workings, rendering the performance of pedagogy strikingly difficult to represent. How do we document these performances and make them accessible in some way to those who weren’t there?

This call for proposals asks scholars and practitioners to critically reframe the performance studies syllabus. If the syllabus (from its Greek origins, meaning “title,” “slip” or “label”) is a protocol for an experiment, how might we design syllabi to serve radical spaces of knowledge making and modes of coming to know? In turn, how might syllabi create new structures within which to learn, reformulating the dynamics and relationships between the positions teacher, student, and institution. As professors and teachers we often informally share syllabi and assignments with one another, but all too rarely do we publicly share our classroom materials. We argue that performance studies as a collective enterprise could benefit greatly from a commons of pedagogical materials. And so we invite contributions to a collection assembling the stuff of teaching, with the syllabus as a central object.

We invite submissions in the following forms:

  • Annotated syllabi
  • Assignments
  • Statements of teaching philosophy
  • Pedagogical reflections, autoethnography, and performative writing
  • Teaching manifestos
  • Notes and marginalia
  • Classroom ephemera
  • Collaborative works with students
  • Images of teaching in action
  • Classroom contracts
  • Alternative modes of assessment and rubrics for evaluation
  • Thank you notes, love letters, and hate mail
  • Transcripts of discussions and conversations
  • Tools and talismans
  • Classroom ritual
  • Desk graffiti 
  • Gossip and other minor modes

Submissions may address the following themes:

  • Experimental pedagogies
  • Relationality and mutuality (hierarchy vs collectivity, group dynamics, power dynamics) 
  • Enactments of difference (race, gender, sexuality, nationality, class, ability)
  • Decolonial practices 
  • Alternative archives
  • Syllabus as intellectual property
  • Pedagogy as citational practice
  • Aspirational syllabi and the classroom ideal 
  • Kinesthetic and movement-based learning 
  • Co-teaching and collaboration
  • Teaching in the time of COVID

Timeline for submissions

Given the range of forms we are soliciting for this special issue, contributions may consist of classroom materials and pieces of writing of up to 5000 words in length and may include visual or audio elements. 

Please send submissions to performancematters.thesyllabus@gmail.com no later than June 15, 2021. Accepted submissions will be notified by October 15, 2021. This special issue is expected to be published in May 2022. 

Please address submissions-related queries to the guest editors Karin Shankar (kshankar@pratt.edu) and Julia Steinmetz (jstein34@pratt.edu)

Performance Matters is a peer-reviewed (double blind), open-access electronic journal published bi-annually by Simon Fraser University. The guest editors of this special issue teach at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY

ATHE 2021 – Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel in Music Theatre/Dance

ATHE’s Music Theatre/Dance Focus Group:

The Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel in Music Theatre/Dance

Deadline: March 1, 2021

The Music Theatre/Dance (MT/D) Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) announces its call for papers for the Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel in Music Theatre/Dance at the 2021 ATHE conference in Austin, TX from August 5-8, 2021. Accepted papers will be published in Studies in Musical Theatre, and panelists will receive a complimentary copy of Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Show Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-in- Process.

This annual panel is held in memory of Dr. Bruce Kirle, scholar of musical theatre and longtime member of the MT /D Focus Group. Dr. Brian Herrera, Associate Professor of Theater at Princeton University, will serve as this year’s respondent. (Please see below for more on Drs. Kirle and Herrera.)

Paper submissions may concern any area within the purview of the MT/D Focus Group, which encompasses opera, operetta, musical theatre, dance theatre, performance art with music or dance elements, and pedagogy of music theatre and dance. This year, in the spirit of the 2021 ATHE conference theme of recognition and reckoning, paper submissions are encouraged, but not required, to embrace topics, methods, and strategies that decenter white cis- heteropatriarchy.

Submissions are open to emerging scholars (including graduate students) who have not yet presented at a national conference on a topic related to music theatre or dance, as well as established scholars who have not previously presented or published in the areas of music theatre or dance. Scholars must not be scheduled to present on music theatre or dance topics at any other national conference prior to the submission date, and papers may not be cross- submitted to another ATHE panel for the 2021 conference. Scholars may, however, present or serve on other panels at this conference.

For consideration, please submit your paper, 10 to 12 pages in length, as a Microsoft Word document to mtdgradrep@gmail.com by March 1, 2021. Please include a cover page with your name, paper title, institutional affiliation, and contact information, but remove your name from the body of the essay.

Three papers will be selected by a blind-review committee for inclusion on this competitive panel. The selected authors will be expected to participate and present their papers at the conference in Austin. Due to the flexibility required by COVID-related public-health constraints, participation may transpire in an in-person or digital basis, to be determined at a date closer to the conference. Each panelist will receive a copy of Bruce Kirle’s Unfinished Show Business:

Broadway Musicals as Works-in-Process, generously donated by the Kirle family. In addition, panelists will also receive a yearlong subscription to Studies in Musical Theatre (Intellect Books), and their essays will be prepared for publication in that journal.

Please direct any and all questions to the current MT/D Focus Group Graduate Student Representatives, Adrienne Oehlers and Anne Potter, at mtdgradrep@gmail.com.

For more information on the ATHE 2021 conference, visit http://www.athe.org. 

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