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Member News – Bess Rowen

Bess Rowen, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University, recently returned from leading a summer study abroad program for graduate students in Ireland. The course, called the Irish Summer Studio, involved leading students through a week of archival research in Galway and then two weeks of coursework at The Lir Academy in Dublin, including her own course on Irish Theatre and Nationalism. Additionally, she got to take students to shows at the historic Abbey and Gate theaters and on excursions to the Cliffs of Moher, Glendalough, and other exciting places. This course is primarily composed of Villanova students, but is open to other MA and PhD students, too! In addition to this wonderful trip, she has had a busy summer of publications, including an interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about Eugene O’Neill’s influence on him (“Something Very Formal and Weird: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Eugene O’Neill” in The Eugene O’Neill Review), a chapter on María Irene Fornés and Paula Vogel in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities, an article about staging teenage girlhood in Theatre Survey (“An Endless Capacity for Dissembling: Representing Teenage Girls on the American Stage from The Children’s Hour Through If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka“), and a Gale Cengage educational resource on The Glass Menagerie. 

Bess Rowan stands with six students at a cliffside scenic overlook in Ireland.
Bess Rowan stands with six students, their arms linked together, while standing side by side on a beach in Ireland.

Member News – Mark Cosdon

Mark Cosdon spent the fall 2023 semester teaching a course on contemporary US theatre at Sicily’s University of Palermo.  This past year, Cosdon was invited to make presentations at the University of Rome – Sapienza and the University of Bergamo. Cosdon was awarded a spring 2024 Fulbright to Egypt, but ultimately declined the honor.  Cosdon continues as Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Allegheny College.  In spring 2024, Cosdon directed the musical Head Over Heels.  This past May/June Cosdon taught his tenth month-long travel course in Italy, with destinations including Amelia, Rome, Florence, and Naples.  

Member News – Amy Huang

Amy Huang received a 2024-2025 short term Balch Institute Fellowship at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to support her project, Further than Firsts: Theatre History and Early Asian American and Diasporic Theatre Artistry, which focuses on several artists who could be considered among the first Asian diasporic theatre artists to work in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Huang examines how these historical “firsts” worked to conceptualize temporality and history. 

Member News – Dorothy Chansky

Dorothy Chansky was a Fulbright Fellow in Poland during the spring 2024 semester.  She taught two classes in American drama at the University of Lodz and also gave guest lectures at universities in Paris, Thessaloniki, Krakow, and Nafplio.

Member News – MLA Liaison

Welcome to Vicki Hoskins, our new Liaison for coordinating ATDS sessions at the annual Modern Language Association conference! To contact Dr. Hoskins with your inquiries and proposals, e-mail her at vh@sfsu.edu. Thank you to our previous MLA Liaison, Bess Rowen, for the tremendous programming over the past few years.

ATDS Members Win 2024 ATHE Awards

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.

States/Stages of Emergency: An ATDS Pre-Conference

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States/Stages of Emergency: An ATDS Pre-Conference

Tuesday, July 30, 2024 over Zoom

Proposals to participate as a panelist due: June 15, 2024

This is an emergency. From neoliberal capitalism and censorship of our stages and our syllabi to physical assaults on our students and legislated attacks on anti-racist programming and queer, trans, and nonbinary people, U.S. American higher education calls upon us to organize.

This American Theatre and Drama Society pre-conference will have free registration and take place online to gather all of us, as we aim to include those who might not be able to attend the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Atlanta for accessibility, caregiving, political, financial, and/or environmental reasons. Let’s plan.

State of the Job Market

Following up on ATDS’s Adjunct Advocacy session at last summer’s ATHE, this session will look specifically at the current state of the academic job market in theatre and performance studies. Noe Montez (Associate Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Tufts University) will share the latest data from his job market tracking research. There will then be an opportunity for attendees to ask questions and share reflections on the 2023-2024 job cycle, and for the group to brainstorm ways to advocate for more full-time positions within our institutions as well as imagine more diverse careers for theatre and performance scholars and educators.

Stages of Censorship

With alarming frequency and as proclaimed by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund (DLDF), theatre productions are being banned. “We are no longer dealing with one off cancellations driven by the squeamishness of a particular high school principal,” said DLDF President John Weidman. “We are dealing with deliberate, orchestrated efforts by institutions, from local school boards all the way up to state legislatures, to dictate the ideological boundaries within which theater will be permitted, the space within which the unique, idiosyncratic voices of Americans writing for the stage will either be tolerated or suppressed.”

This roundtable invites the perspectives of participants with direct experience and/or historical perspectives on theater censorship at the intersections of politics, culture, and artistic expression. Following 6-8 minute presentations of participants’ case-studies, open conversation will follow concerning the stakes of censorship in theatre today. If you are interested in presenting a case study, please submit a brief abstract and a 100-word bio using this form by June 15, 2024.

Restrictive States: Centering Comrades on the Ground

Building on our statement last year, this roundtable highlights colleagues working in institutions where state legislatures have banned EDI pedagogy and drag performance and undermined tenure and shared governance. They will share their experiences contending with these policies in order to educate attendees and strategize collective actions.

If you are interested in offering 5-minute remarks as a formal panelist, then please submit a 100150-word abstract summarizing your potential contribution and a 100-word bio using this form by June 15, 2024.

Note for Attendees:

Registration information for all those who would like to participate in this virtual Pre-Conference as attendees will be available in the coming weeks.

Attendance is free and open to ATDS members and non-members!

Questions:

The ATDS virtual Pre-Conference planning team is listed below. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

Ginny Anderson (vanderso@conncoll.edu)
Donatella Galella (galella@ucr.edu)
Amy Meyer (meyer.amy.e@gmail.com)
Heidi Nees (hlnees@bgsu.edu) Samuel Yates (yates@psu.edu)

ATDS First Book Bootcamp 2024

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ATDS First Book Bootcamp 2024
 
Can you write your first book? Yes, you can!
The annual First Book Bootcamp pairs contingent and tenure-stream faculty with experienced faculty mentors to develop book proposals. Mentoring faculty will read participants’ materials in advance and meet during the Bootcamp in one-on-one sessions for targeted feedback. In addition to these one-on-one mentoring sessions, the First Book Bootcamp includes workshops on the book proposal process, panels with series and acquisition editors and recent first-time authors, open writing sessions, and peer conversations. After the two-week Bootcamp, participants will attend a virtual reunion to update mentors on their progress, solicit advice, and sustain this supportive community of scholars.
 
Eligibility
Anyone working on a research monograph in the fields of theatre or performance studies broadly defined is eligible to apply. The First Book Bootcamp is NOT intended for those still completing their PhDs.
 
Schedule
The Bootcamp will run via Zoom two weeks in July (TBD) , with multiple group and one-on-one sessions. Participants will be selected and assigned a mentor by June 15. Participants must submit their materials (sample chapter, draft book proposal, etc.) to mentors no later than 1 July. Accepted participants are expected to attend all scheduled sessions. 
At the conclusion of the bootcamp, participants will have engaged in a minimum of 10 hours of intensive mentorship, workshopping of their research materials, and conversations with professionals in the field.
Application
To apply, fill out this google form: https://forms.gle/7Qeb7TwADarJivYMA
Applications include your project title, 150-word abstract, status of your project, goals for the First Book Bootcamp as well as your CV and contact information and are due June 5. If you have any questions, please email convenors Michael Y. Bennett, Michelle Granshaw, and Kirsten Pullen at atdsfirstbookbootcamp@gmail.com.

ATDS at MLA – Update

ATDS held two sponsored panels at this year’s annual conference for the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first panel was “Theater in or of Joy and Sorrow: Representation of Marginalized Communities in the Americans.” This panel, chaired by Bess Rowen, featured work by Christina Baker (Temple University) about a performance that revolves around a Mexican mother’s attempt to memorialize and make sense of her tween daughter’s disappearance, a joint presentation from Kelly Aliano (LaGuardia Community College, CUNY) and Dongshin Chang (Hunter College, CUNY) about their experiences empowering students through devised, identity-based work during Covid, and a part of Teya Juarez’s (University of Buffalo) work on the way contemporary plays consistently tie fat representation to sorrowful narratives. The joy that can be found in representation was a clear theme throughout this panel.
 
Our second panel was titled “Theater in Joy and Sorrow, Theatre of Joy and Sorrow: Performance and Embodiment of Marginalized Communities in the Americas,” and was chaired by Louise Geddes (Adelphi University). It included Jason Fitzgerald’s (University of Michigan) paper about the connection between Suzan Lori-Parks’s 365 Plays / 365 Days and the Iraq war, Eh-Den Perlove’s (University of Manchester) study of how the pandemic changed the context and resonances of Elinor T. Vaderburg’s play Bloodshot, Valerie Joyce’s (Villanova University) research on how living historiography can be used to reinscribe Black women into the narrative of history through performance, and Louise Geddes’s own work on the camp cabaret performances of Salty Brine. Here, the theme often returned to how performing sorrow could be a way to find moments of joy in both expression and representation.
 
Thanks to all for sharing their fascinating work!

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