The 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: February 15, 2020
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 2020 ATHE conference in Detroit, Michigan from July 29-August 2, 2020. 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 Music Theatre/Dance Focus Group. Dr. Kelly Kessler, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University, will serve as this year’s respondent. (Please see below for more on Drs. Kirle and Kessler.)
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. Paper submissions are especially encouraged to address intersections of ability, class, race, gender, nationality, and sexuality with global musical theatre/dance, broadly construed.
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 2020 conference. Scholars may, however, present or serve on other panels at this conference.
For consideration, please e-mail your paper, 10 to 12 pages in length, as a Microsoft Word attachment to mtdgradrep@gmail.com by February 1, 2020. 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 attend and present their papers at the conference in Detroit. 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, Stephanie Lim and Adrienne Oehlers, at mtdgradrep@gmail.com.
For more information on the ATHE 2020 conference, visit http://www.athe.org.