Conference 2012 Working Session CFPs
| 2012 Working Session CFPs |
Working Session Calls for Papers
DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND THE PERFORMING ARTS The performing arts have had a long, distinguished tradition of practice, recently enhanced by creative use of emerging technologies. Diverse collections representing print, electronic, multimedia, visual resources, and ephemera support our research. While Digital Humanities is currently a frequently discussed topic, how does this affect libraries, archives, museums, teaching and learning, and new scholarship in the performing arts? We invite panelists to respond to the following questions:
If not us, who? If not now, when?
The theatre/performance studies classroom provides a unique laboratory in which to explore the embodied pedagogy of community engagement. As outlined in the Carnegie Classifications, “Community Engagement describes the collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” Given the increasing influence of neoliberalism in higher education, we can see the rise of such community engagement as both an artifact of corporatization (colleges see community partnerships as student/consumer-friendly because they emphasize “real-world” experience) and a potential site of resistance to it (such partnerships require negotiation with communities that both the academy and the corporate world have often marginalized or excluded). Either way, as our colleges and universities increase their investment in engaged pedagogy, let us not forget that performance, by definition, is always already publicly engaged and embodied—which is to say that many theatre/performance studies professors have been engaged with their communities throughout their careers.
The purpose of this seminar is to provide a forum for the scholarship of engagement within the context of theatre/performance studies research and teaching. We seek scholars who mobilize theatre/performance to create, engage with, and maintain alternative communities, broadly defined.
Potential topics might include:
Format:
To participate in this seminar group: please send an abstract (200-300 words) that articulates how your research connects to the seminar topic, in addition to a brief (100 word) biography, to BOTH conveners by May 31, at the following email addresses: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Research Group: Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and Performance John Lutterbie, Stony Brook Univeristy (
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The research group in Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and Performance solicits proposals for papers that focus on the methods for conducting research using a cognitive scientific approach to theatre, dance, and performance. Our aim is to conduct a close reading of some examples of scholars using science to ask and answer questions in the arts and humanities. How exactly does this interdisciplinary strategy open up important questions in our field? We seek abstracts that explore the terrain and the topography of the field. In the working group we will have a dialogue between senior and junior scholars about how and why this theoretical approach works and where it may be going. A primary objective is to reinforce rigorous standards for our research as cognitive science establishes itself as an emerging methodology of study in theatre, dance and performance studies.
To focus this work, we will ask participants to examine at least one of the following essays: Hart, F. Elizabeth. “A Paltry ‘Hoop of Gold’: Semantics and Systematicity in Early Modern Studies.” The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive. Eds, Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Reason, Matthew and Dee Reynolds. “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance.” Dance Research Journal, 42.2, (Winter 2010): 49-75. Sweetser, Eve. “Whose Rhyme Is Whose Reason? Sound and Sense in Cyrano De Bergerac.” Language and Literature. Vol. 15. London: Sage Pub., 2006. 29-54.
Interested participants should send a proposal to
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and
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no later than May 31, 2012. Proposals should include: a) your area of study; b) the methodological approach you have been using in your work; c) an abstract (of no more than 250 words) that clearly defines the argument that will be made; d) a brief bibliography, including at least one of the essays above, and e) contact information. All selected participants must become members of ASTR. Completed papers, of no more than 3000 words, are then due on August 1, 2012. The papers will subsequently be distributed to participants, and groups formed. Scholars are expected to participate in an on-line discussion of the papers with other members of the group prior to arriving at the conference, as well as reading the essays of all other participants.
For additional information about presenter responsibilities go to: http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines
Working Group: “Experiments in Democracy: Performing an Interracial and Multicultural America, 1900-1950”. Co-conveners:
This Working Session revisits a topic first investigated at ASTR’s 2009 Annual Meeting. Its theme comes from a 1932 Chicago Defender article describing the Hedgerow Theatre in Moylan-Rose Valley, PA as “more than a theater, it is an experiment in democracy."* The Hedgerow (under the leadership of Jasper Deeter, a white director) garnered this praise from one of America’s leading African-American newspapers—by creating unique opportunities for interracial collaboration and socialization on stage, behind the scenes, and among audiences. Their work—undertaken within an era of American history marked by entrenched racial segregation—offered to the American public a model of interracial community-building that foreshadowed greater strides toward racial integration and cooperation that the nation would realize in subsequent decades. The session will bring together scholars whose current research investigates such “experiment[s] in democracy” among progressive theatre ensembles, individual artists, theorists and audiences working during the pre-Civil Rights era. We seek participants with diverse perspectives on the American theatre’s historic struggles (both its “successes” and its “failures”) in modeling interracial and multicultural citizenship across all axes of race and/or ethnicity. We are especially interested in critically examining the ways in which these practices have challenged or sustained racial apartheid and white privilege. Potential areas of inquiry might include:
SESSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES Proposal Submissions: Please email by May 31, 2012 a 250-word abstract and brief biography to the session’s conveners. Please email the conveners at the addresses listed above with any additional questions about the session. All selected participants must become members of ASTR. Participants should review the guidelines for Working Sessions on ASTR’s website prior to submitting proposals: http://www.astr.org/conference/working-sessions-guidelines.
* Dewey R. Jones, "Hedgerow sets new standard in solution of American theatre race problem," Chicago Defender, 17 December 1932. Black Theatre Scrapbook, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY.
Session Title: “Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter”
Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University
The question that frames the discussion of theatre/performance historiography today often concerns its relationship to the cultures performing it and the thought processes it expresses. The sciences—for example, the monist tradition, mathematics, cognitive studies, and neurobiology—are evoked to enunciate the new materiality of the object of study, a materiality molded by the post-human and post-political predicament of bringing natural science and cultural theory into theatre and performance historiography.
This working session will gather scholars who are interested in addressing the following topics suggested in the Conference Call:
We would like this session to draw attention to and investigate a historiography whose function is to be a mode of thinking, a model of action within the existing real. The focus of the operation is not the way reality is experienced, but the exploration of the mediality of reality, in time, space, and matter. This exploration draws attention to the inner contradictions of social and ideological organizations by establishing a different trajectory of thinking about historiography, one which presents a challenge to both social networks and ontologies of the present. This materiality and this situatedness of thought in time and space, as Giorgio Agamben observed, invariably accompany every conception of history. As a mode of thinking, this material historiography is implicit in, conditions, and elucidates what it examines, not by examining the flaws and imperfections of its historical subjects, or by offering a set of criticisms designed to make the system better, but by exposing what the sources of those values are, how they have come into being, what the relationships are that they have constituted, and by exposing the powers they have secured.
Please submit 300-word paper proposals to Professor Rosemarie K. Bank ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Michal Kobialka ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by May 31, 2012.
Indigenous Performance Research in the Americas:
Stephanie Lein Walseth, University of Minnesota,
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The verb “to reconcile” seems rhetorically innocuous when devoid of context: “To restore to friendship or harmony; to settle, resolve; to make consistent or congruous” (Merriam-Webster.com). Its marriage to truth commissions across the globe, however, has made reconciliation an embattled concept. In the Americas, the rhetoric of reconciliation is perhaps strongest throughout South America, where it tends to address the ramifications of political oppression in the late 20th century and has come under fire for conflating the needs of the State with the material and spiritual recoveries of the populations supposedly served by the reconciliation process. This ASTR session invites participants to consider the potential meanings and implications of reconciliation in the Americas as they intersect with indigenous histories and performance. Rather than proposing a single definition for a term that is historically vexed, we invite scholars and practitioners to consider the following questions or to propose their own:
In advance of the conference, participants will be put into small groups and will share 10-12 page essays in mid-September. Via email, participants and the conveners will identify key concepts, arguments, and topics through which to structure the two-hour working group session at the conference.
Applicants should send proposals of 300 words or less (in Word attachments, with affiliation and full contact information) by Thursday, May 31st, 2012 to Stephanie Lein Walseth ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Ann Haugo ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).
Historians tend to focus their studies on individuals, companies, or practices that have been deemed influential: this working group session aims to investigate the issue of influence, and the ideas of importance or success imbricated in it, in relation to the history of British alternative theatre. How do we notice, document, narrate, and analyze influence, especially when the traces of such influence may be ephemeral? Michel De Certeau cautions that “writing speaks of the past only in order to inter it. Writing is a tomb in the double sense of the word in that, in the very same text, it both honors and eliminates.” Scholars keep alive the idea of alternative; the alternative is also alive in techniques and aesthetic vocabulary that have been passed on in all sorts of acknowledged and unacknowledged ways. We tend to focus on the most obvious pathways of influence, in the archive and in the repertoire: education/mentorship, collaboration, and imitation in the transference of alternative epistemology. This session seeks to push those pathways toward a more Foucauldian genealogy across alternative theatre work. What relationships exist between twenty-first century performance and the work of past alternative artists that allows us to view both of them within a total field or system of practice? This session seeks to connect the upsurge in scholarly attention to contemporary devised performance, physical theatre, and live art with the simultaneous increased interest in documenting the activities of alternative theatre of the 1970s and 1980s, provoking critical insight about methods for writing vibrant performance histories about British alternative theatre.
Proposals for papers may include any of the following approaches or topics
Format
Submissions
Performance as Research and Practice Based Research: Historic, Current, and Forthcoming
Co-conveners:
The Performance as Research Working Group engages with scholarship that is both grounded in praxis and informed by theory. The Working Group invites artists, scholars and artist-scholars to participate in an interdisciplinary dialogue focused on the epistemological and methodological questions raised by research involving live, aesthetic and artistic performance. We are interested in scholarship that takes artistic praxis as its object and which acknowledges the essential differences between empirical knowledge and its scholarly articulation.
Over the last six years the Performance as Research Working Groups assembled at ASTR have involved scholars and artists with diverse investments in relation to performance practice and its discursive formulation. Our approach has always involved a cross-disciplinary analysis of the centrality of embodied experience in both the creation and reception of performance, as well as the challenges (methodological, theoretical, rhetorical) attendant on the process of its articulation. We continue to focus on the experiential not only as a dimension that bridges the concerns of theorists and practitioners, but also because it is a pragmatic tool for investigating the limits and conventions of scholarly discourse.
Topics Co-conveners Kris Salata and Daniel Mroz are editing a book bringing together the ideas and inquiries that the Working Group has generated since its inception. This year’s session will be organized around the topics that have been raised regularly over the last six sessions, with the structure of this eventual volume in mind. Proposals need not be limited to these topics, but will likely fall into one of the following areas:
Format The conference working session will be preceded by the exchange of papers (and other documentation if applicable) and substantive dialogue between the group members prior to the actual conference, responding to one another’s contributions. During the pre-conference discussion we will select the key issues on which the group will focus at the conference.
Proposals should not exceed 300 words and be accompanied by a short bio. Please send proposals by May 31, 2012 to the conveners: Daniel Mroz, University of Ottawa, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and Kris Salata, Florida State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Selected participants will be notified by June 15th, 2012. We will initiate email discussion on the basis of proposals on August 1, 2012, with an initial draft of a paper no longer than 10 pages to be circulated no later than September 15th, 2012.
Session Leaders: Kimberly Jannarone, Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz and Keren Zaiontz, Lecturer, Roehampton University, London, UK
This seminar addresses how mass spectacle mobilizes citizens to express modes of cultural belonging. We seek papers that will contribute to a critical dialogue on the role of large-scale events in the formation of citizenship. From the official gathering of North Korean citizens openly weeping for the death of Kim Jong-il to unofficial gatherings to sing the American national anthem in Spanish, citizenship relies on the appeals and contradictions of theatrical display. Theatricality's ability to transform subjects into citizens is a globalized practice claimed by both the state and the stateless. Both can turn to mass choreography, song, speeches, and orchestrated visual display to give shape and power to their political ideologies. Artists have long been integral to the infrastructure of public spectacle. The utopian possibilities they promote make them key to how citizenship is enacted through the immediacy of mass bodies.
We invite essays that analyze the co-creative roles of artists and citizens in the formation of festivals, world’s fairs, revolutionary spectacles, mass choreographies, Olympic ceremonies, Occupy movements, and other mass forms crossing performance genres and political lines.
Essays might consider: What role do communities play in creating or resisting patriotic definitions of the nation sponsored by the state? How might artists and activists stage “counter-nationalist modes of belonging” (Butler) through public art events, and how might those modes travel across ideological lines? Can state- and corporate-sponsored events make room for spaces of critical dialogue and civil dissent? Or does such sponsorship create its own political charge? How does the relationship between the audience and the performer define itself when there are thousands of participants, and when does the sheer number of orchestrated or gathered bodies mandate its own rules for that relationship?
Papers are welcome addressing any era and place of performance history.
Format This will take the form of a focused three-hour seminar. Participants will be expected to read each other's abstracts and papers. Authors will have discussed their papers with selected other members of the group in October. In addition to paper contributions, we will read selections from theorists and fiction writers concerned with the protocols of national performance. We will discuss how these disparate readings inform our thinking on mass spectacle. Authors will begin the seminar by outlining and investigating points of intersection in their papers. The papers will be distributed not only among the seminar authors but also, ideally, made available for interested ASTR members in order to enable the highest degree of conversation possible once the seminar convenes in Nashville.
Please send 250 word abstracts by May 31 to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Katie Egging, University of Kansas,
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From the 2012 international tour of War Horse to Aquila Theatre’s novel approach to looking at veterans in ancient Greek plays, scholarly investigations of the intersections of war and performance are thriving. As part of the ongoing theatre of war working group, we seek to continue our exploration of the traditions and innovations of war on stage. Performing war is relevant to this year’s conference theme because the presentation of war, whether a current conflict or an ancient one, is permeated by notions of history and historiography, memory and memorial. The working group seeks to bring together a broad range of approaches, and scholars from all levels of expertise are welcome to apply and help enrich work on the histories of performance and war.
Papers might address how plays, performances, musicals, operas, popular entertainments, re-enactments, and dance help answer these questions:
All papers must be submitted electronically in MS Word or a compatible format. Images, video, music or other multimedia are strongly encouraged, but the participant must be able share it with the group prior to the conference.
Please submit a 300-word abstract, along with name, affiliation, and brief bio (250 words) to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by May 31, 2012.
Interrogating the Romance of Community Theater and Performance
Michelle Baron, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
This working group seeks to investigate the potential and problematics of “community” through an examination of theatrical forms and social engagements that that could be considered "community theater" in all of the various forms and guises that term has taken. This group, of course, borrows its title from feminist scholar Miranda Joseph’s book, Against the Romance of Community, which launches a critique against community as a libratory category. Many scholars have joined Joseph in questioning the use of “community” as an organizing concept for certain modes of socially engaged theater, performance, and art practice. For example, art historian Miwon Kwon cautions against the essentializing tendencies of community-based art, in which “community” is reduced to “commonality,” in turn closing down political and aesthetic potential (One Place After Another, 2004). At the same time, scholars and artists continue to locate the political potential of theater and performance in its ability to bring people together in temporary community. Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005) argues that “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world” (2).
The goal of this working group is to investigate this tension, and to think through ways in which artists might, as Grant Kester puts it, “define [themselves] through solidarity with others while at the same time recognizing the contingent nature of this identification” (Conversation Pieces, 2004, 163). Is there something about this particular historical moment that makes us uniquely prone to seeking out community and/or convivial encounters? How might Occupy movement’s public performances of interdependency shed light on this discussion? What might historical examples of community theater have to say to contemporary manifestations and invocations of “community”? How can we historicize this term and its uses both in the past and in our contemporary moment? We will look at a range of performance sites, such as audience development by regional theaters, socially engaged performance, and amateur theatrical productions. We seek participants whose work includes any of the following questions: is all theater intended for a community? Can theater define communities? Trouble definitions of communities? Revitalize communities? Participate in the shift of a community (for instance, by participating in the project of gentrification)? What types of ethical responsibilities are created by the formation of community? How are these communities defined and/or engaged?
Participants will be given a selection of common texts during summer 2012. Prior to the meeting in Nashville, group members will circulate papers (7-10 pages) that respond to the common readings in connection with their own research projects. Participants will be asked to read and respond to these papers prior to the conference meeting. To apply to this working group, please send a 500-word abstract and a brief bio to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by May 31, 2012.
Organizers
Rationale Although entanglements and connections have always been an important part of history and are the rule rather than the exception, it is surprising that theatre has not been on the agenda of global histories, nor has theatre historiography significantly contributed to the new research paradigm of writing history transnationally or globally. Particularly during the early phase of globalization, imperialism, and the process of the ‘birth of the modern world’ (cf. Bayly 2004), theatre became a transnational or even global practice and a crucial cultural institution in many countries. Be it theatre architecture, theatrical forms and formats, or the mobility of singers/actors/impresarios, theatre has been part and parcel or sometimes even the node of a transnational network of artistic exchange. The session aims at elaborating on the challenges of writing theatre history from a global and transnational angle. The tasks include finding the object and focus of research, balancing the “local” and the “global”, examining the many approaches and research methods, dealing with an unusual and often multilingual corpus of source material and resources, and discussing implications for the teaching of theatre history.
Format
Deadline for submission of short biography and abstract (300 words): 31 May 2012, submitted to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Historically, the Americas have been constructed through a hierarchy that moves from East to West, North to South. From the 15th century colonial project, through independence, and into the age of U.S. imperial, military, and economic control, the hemisphere was mapped through systems of power that placed Latin American in a position of subordinate “other” to Europe and the United States. This framing has produced a series of challenges from artists and scholars that seek to remedy the centuries of violence and exploitation imposed by this positioning. In 1935, Joaquín Torres García subversively inverted the map of South America, claiming: “our North is the South […] That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we know what our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world would like to have it.” However, in 1992, Immanuel Wallerstein and Aníbal Quijano asserted that the Americas continue in a path of inequality, where they conform to a “single world order in which the US occupies top place and Latin America a subordinate place.”
These tensions have affected the ways scholars approach and understand theatrical movements and histories across the hemisphere. We propose a working session that questions the cartographies of the theatricalities of the Americas. How do we (re)position Latin America within our theatrical imaginaries in a way that allows its people, culture, and histories agency and subjectivity? In what ways have theatrical histories of the Americas been mapped? Who is doing the mapping and who is the intended audience? From whose perspective should we understand these hierarchies of power? What are the repercussions of these new visions of mapping? Where do we locate liminal performances of identity, culture, and history within these new formations?
For this working session we invite papers that consider the following, among others: 1) a re-examination of national and regional theatre histories; 2) the trajectories of particular groups, artists, or authors; 3) the theorization of the hemispheric divide; 4) the problematization of geography and language; 5) the impact of globalization and neoliberal policies; 6) and the patterns of migration and exile. Our working group seeks to combine scholars and practitioners who will articulate a reflection not only on different histories and theatricalities, but also on the state of the field.
Please email a 250-word abstract and brief bio to both session conveners by May 31st. If you have any questions, feel free to email with inquiries prior to the deadline.
Session conveners:
Call For Papers, Deadline: Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Shakespearean Performance Research Group of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) provides an ongoing home for the study of Shakespearean performance within ASTR.
For the 2012 conference, “Theatrical Histories,” we seek papers that address issues relating to the history, theory, and practice of Shakespeare performance. While research group papers need not be tied to the conference theme, our inquiries do engage with several areas germane to the themes of the conference and we particularly invite papers that broadly interrogate the "histories" of Shakespearean performance. For example, this questioning might involve the interplay between early and late modern performance in some dimension, the symbolic histories in which Shakespearean drama and performance continue to function, the ways in which relationships between the “literary” and the “performative” have been construed throughout history, the theories and histories of Shakespearean performance across performance media, how Shakespeare performance constructs and is constructed by specific communities. Papers accepted to previous sessions have tended to address questions of practical theatre, specific issues in history and historiography, and theoretical concerns, but we are looking for a wide range of engagements with Shakespeare and performance.
Selected papers will be assigned to subgroups by the group’s conveners, Catherine Burriss, Franklin J. Hildy, Robert Ormsby, Don Weingust and W. B. Worthen, and the conveners will organize on-line communication of subgroup members before the conference. At the conference session, papers will be discussed first within subgroups, after which the subgroups will come together to exchange ideas.
Please submit a 200-word abstract and 50-word academic biographical statement, including current affiliations, if any, by Thursday, May 31st, 2012, to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (proposals also can be mailed to Don Weingust, Center for Shakespeare Studies, Southern Oregon University, 1250 Siskiyou Boulevard, Ashland, OR 97520).
Over the last few years, ASTR has focused attention on the intersection between dance and theatre research, establishing the Selma Jeanne Cohen and Sally Banes awards and meeting jointly with CORD in 2010. This working group builds upon these organizational developments and maps the conceptual terrain of the relationship between these two fields. Dance and theatre scholars share numerous topics in common and benefit from the intersections and collaborations that the closeness of these fields makes possible. However, at times the study of theatre and the study of dance necessitate different methodological approaches and theories and, depending upon context, draw upon different histories. Given this year’s conference theme, it seems pertinent to consider when and why the two fields intersect, and how scholars working between dance and theatre studies carry out their work.
Questions proposed for this working session include:
Working Session Format: During the conference meeting, the 2-hour time slot will provide time for participants first to break up into their smaller groups to continue the pre-conference discussion. We will reconvene as a larger group to share our findings and make connections across groups in the second half of the meeting, opening up time for audience questions and participation as well.
We welcome papers that present case studies focused on intersections between theatre and dance and/or that examine the methodological and theoretical implications and opportunities of working between these fields. Proposals are invited from scholars at all levels in the form of a 300-word abstract and a brief bio, due May 31, 2012. Please email proposals to Tara Rodman: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Unsafe Realism 2.0: Rethinking Feminist Realisms
Roberta Barker, Associate Prof., Dalhousie University (
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In 2009, the first “Unsafe Realism” working session at ASTR convened a broad range of scholars working in both theatre studies and performance studies to re-think established scholarly biases around stage realism and naturalism. In the wake of new scholarship by Jill Dolan, Ellen Gainor, and Rhonda Blair, among others, our goal with that session was to look again at the notion that realism is “safe”: that – whether as performance technique, or as textual framework – it forms a kind of easy, comfortable “home” for too many writers and practitioners, and along the way evacuates the stage of political and social power. “Unsafe Realism 2.0” will advance the exciting conversations we had in 2009 by refocusing our work specifically around feminist concerns. Feminist theory has historically been resistant to realism, viewing it as politically retrograde and the affective responses it engenders as fatal to women’s liberation. Yet recent developments are challenging such established conclusions. Within the last three and a half years, Theatre Journal has published two special issues (in 2008 and 2010) on women and feminism in theatre and performance today, and Jean Benedetti’s fresh translations of the major works of Stanislavsky in 2008 continue to influence important revisions of our scholarly understanding of realist performance praxis. At the same time, burgeoning work in affect studies encourages theatre scholars to consider anew the “problem” of emotional attachments to the stage. Especially within the context of broader insecurities about feminism’s staying power through the twenty-first century, what might these new scholarly developments have to teach us about possible relationships between feminism and realism? How might contemporary realist theory and praxis aid rather than hinder a feminist politic? Can realism – quite contrary to our expectations – participate in women’s theatrical futures, as it has already, for better or for worse, participated in women’s theatre history?
Papers may:
Please send abstracts (250-400 words) and a brief biographical note (50 words) to Roberta Barker ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) AND Kim solga ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by May 31, 2012. Please note that successful participants will be expected to begin the drafting process over the summer, and to work closely with co-participants online during the fall. This work will be mandatory.
Jessica Berson, Harvard University
“History” implies logos. Even when exploring the histories of physical performance forms that lack conventional notation systems or “texts,” scholars revert to the language of language, falling back on phrases like “movement vocabulary,” “written on the body,” and “inscribed in gesture.” Dance studies in particular can be vexed by the conflation of history and the written word, since its subject necessarily operates within an embodied, rather than linguistic, mode of perception and transmission. Without a written text, dance is often documented only through the kinesthetic memory of its practitioners: in some sense, the dance is the dancer.
The dancer’s body serves as one kind of archive, while the perceptions of audiences offer another, interweaving “sensible” and “intelligible” understandings of movement events and experiences. Both recovering dances from the past and passing them on to dancers of the future are multivalent processes that demand mobile and malleable strategies. As dance continues to move into mainstream media and popular consciousness via reality television series like “Dancing with the Stars,” films like Wim Wenders’ “Pina,” and the omnipresence of flashmobs deployed for both social action and corporate marketing, questions of choreography, memory, authenticity, and cultural migration become more urgent. This working session asks how dancing bodies construct and narrate multiple histories—social, cultural, personal, political. We seek contributions that interrogate notions of embodiment and history through a wide range of questions:
Please submit a 300 word abstract and brief biographical statement to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by May 31st. Participants must be members of ASTR at the time of the conference.
We seek papers for a Working Group entitled “Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Histories, or, the Long, the Deep, and the Wide.” Long, deep, and wide are three descriptive words often associated with 18th century studies, and nodding to the theme of the conference we want to explore how these words might help “cast” the theatrical history of the 18th century we construct. We are particularly interested in papers that address the following question posed by the conference organizers: “How might we resituate theorizations of the archive and the repertoire, of periodization and the past, within our research on theatrical histories?” Recently, excellent new histories of the 18th century have emerged, challenging the notions of who “performed” during the 18th century and how those performances were understood. We seek to continue down these profitable pathways. Following the conference theme of “Theatrical Histories,” we welcome a range of methodological approaches and scholarly interventions. Proposals may explore the history of theatre practice, examine history through the lens of theatre and performance studies, employ some combination of these approaches, or strike off in new directions. Paper topics might include:
Participants will draft a 10-15 page paper to circulate to subgroups by September 15th. After online discussions within the small subgroup and with the group leaders, participants will have the opportunity to make revisions before circulating their papers to the entire working group on October 15th.
250 word abstracts or questions should be sent by May 31,2012 to both:
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Contaminating Bodies, Infectious Spectacles, Troubling Histories: Women on Performative Display
How do female bodies in performance trouble historiographic processes of looking, spectating, recording, and (re)performing? In what ways does the liveness and/or presentness of female bodies in performance—especially bodies considered excessive or infectious—trouble how women are written into theatre histories and how affect circulates through those histories? Related to Joseph Roach’s notion of “deep skin,” how might historically situated ways of seeing and/or historiographic methods contaminate the record of female bodies on stage? How might theatre historians and artists overcome these obstacles in their own practices?
This session expands upon the work begun during our 2010 and 2011 “Contaminating Bodies” working sessions. There, participants considered questions related to media, modes of circulation, and affective production in order to examine how performance cultures across time and space have perpetuated notions of the female body as infectious and contaminating. This 2012 session continues to interrogate that theme but with greater attention to historical processes and historiographic methodologies. Although we encourage members of our previous working sessions to submit proposals, we also invite new voices and perspectives into this conversation. We encourage work from a range of historical periods, geographies, and theoretical frameworks.
We will organize session participants into smaller working groups. In early October, participants will exchange 8-10 page papers within those groups. The conference session will begin with small group feedback before moving to large group discussion.
Please submit a 200-word abstract and brief bio to both Jen-Scott Mobley ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Jill Stevenson ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by Thursday, May 31st.
Group Leaders:
Performance and (Bio)politics: From Liveness to Life is open to both scholars who are working at the intersection of these areas as well as to encourage scholars who would like to explore the idea of applying biopolitics to their own research.
By focusing on the broader concept of life rather than on the more traditional concept of the body, embodiment, and liveness, we propose to study the interconnections of performance and biopolitics as they might occur in different areas of investigation such as:
From plays like Carol Churchill’s A Number (2002) to films such as Never Let Me Go (2010); from the bio-art of Eduardo Kac to the work of Critical Art Ensemble; from the performed rhetoric of anti-choice politics to the problematic definition of individual “rights,” this working session seeks papers exploring the issues at stake in biopolitical discourse. How, we ask, do such issues permeate—perhaps unnoticed—our everyday life to the extent that performances of life and performances over life have become the political means of power, empowerment, and disempowerment?
Interested participants should submit abstracts of 350 words maximum by 31 May 2012 to the group leaders via email: Sara Brady (
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)
The group will meet at ASTR for a two-hour session during which participants will offer brief theoretical summaries of the main points of their papers followed by an open discussion and brainstorming session about the intersections between performance and biopolitical philosophy, with a focus on key ideas, texts, and/or performances of particular relevance to the group. The last 15 minutes will be open to auditors for questions.
Informal inquiries can also be directed to the group leaders via email.
Ecology and/of/in Performance Working Group (on-going) “Trans-cultural, trans-national, trans-species histories in performance”
Since our first ASTR Working Group session at the 2010 conference in Seattle, the Performance and Ecology Working Group has spawned symposia, anthologies, and publications. Foremost among those is a new volume that grew out of our 2010 session: Readings in Performance and Ecology, eds., Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (Palgrave 2012). Our Working Group has continued valuable research on numerous fronts, including Earth Matters on Stage conference at Carnegie Mellon University (2012) and the Staging Sustainability at York University (2011). Participants in this Working Group have published an array of new material including Ecology and European Drama by Downing Cless (Routledge). Networks and journals in the field such as The Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts Quarterly, the “Fieldworks” issue of Performance Research (eds. Pearson, Roms, Daniels, 2010), and the “Performance and Ecology” section of Theatre Topics (2007) attest to scholars’ acute awareness of environmental politics and ecopoetics praxis in an imminently changing world. The rising tide of this focused research indicate not only a growing concern and mounting artistic will in the realm of ecological sensibility, but also faith in the imagination as a critical aspect of our individual and collective ecological identities. In 2012, as part of ASTR’s "Theatrical Histories" focus, we turn our attention to trans-cultural, trans-national, and trans-species performance in anticipation of a second volume of ecocritical writings on theatre and performance. Our questions for the upcoming 2012 Working Group session include:
Please send Abstracts as word attachments to both Working Group conveners below by May 31, 2012: Theresa May, University of Oregon (
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)
“Digital Histories and Taxonomic Shifts”
Co-Convenors: Jen Parker-Starbuck, Roehampton University, London ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and David Saltz, University of Georgia ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
“If…the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it after a database. But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop poetics, aesthetics, and ethics of this database.” (Manovich, The Language of New Media 194-5)
We seek proposals addressing the application of historical and contemporary taxonomic models to a broad range of multimedia performance practices. Our aim is to not only analyze historical/theoretical notions but to also develop and share a set of proposed “taxonomies” and models that currently exist in the field. We therefore encourage proposals from scholars and practitioners investigating media and performance from a theoretical perspective, and/or using media in ways that reinforce, challenge, or shift existing definitions of “multimedia performance.”
Accepted essays, models, and plans will be shared in advance via an on-line site where participants can exchange and intersect with others. In the in-person session we will work through various proposed models, allowing time for a working session in which we engage with each others’ models.
Please submit 250-word abstracts and ideas with brief (1 page) CVs by May 31 to both convenors Jen Parker-Starbuck and David Saltz at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it AND This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Everyday Life: Histories of the Ordinary, Persistent, and Repeated
This Working Session proposes that the study of performance in everyday life has the potential to revise and reconfigure historical knowledge. Scholars such as Erving Goffman and Victor Turner produced foundational tools by which to think about everyday performance and ritual; we aim to use these and many other analytical frames to think historically about the past and the present, as well as to theorize the future as it unfolds within both. We invite abstracts (and later papers) that think about past, present, and perhaps future performances in everyday life. Topics might include but are not limited to theatre, paratheatre, dance, music, photography, or mediatized performance; material culture; affect and emotions; performances in workplaces, the street, religious settings, or the home; and large-scale processes such as migration, public/civic engagement, consumption, schooling, parenting, or the management of sickness and health. We aim to support the development of projects that approach everyday life not simply as a topic of interest but as a productive category of analysis. Our opening questions include: what do we come to know when we attend to the quotidian and ordinary as categories linked to crisis as well as certainty? How might everyday life be a repository for forms of aesthetic production, political engagement, and other “structures of feeling”? Is the normal always normative? And, centrally, how might the study of everyday life knit together performance studies and the discipline of history?
This Working Session is informally linked to a faculty seminar titled “Everyday Life: The Textures and Politics of the Ordinary, Persistent, and Repeated,” which will be offered by the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University in 2012-2013. That seminar, led by Robin Bernstein and Lizabeth Cohen, brings together scholars from multiple fields, most prominently history and performance studies, to develop new ways of connecting the closely-observed textures of small-scale experiences to broad historical concerns. The seminar, like the ASTR working group, will ask: how do we access and understand the expansive stakes in everyday activities that are ordinary, persistent, and repeated? The ASTR Working Session and the Harvard seminar may include some of the same participants, however, the ASTR working group will be both narrower in focus and broader in concern than the Harvard seminar: theatre and performance will constitute the sole focus of the ASTR working group; further, the scope of the ASTR Working Session, unlike that of the Harvard seminar, will be multinational rather than Americanist. The conveners imagine both the ASTR Working Session and the Harvard seminar as components of a larger intellectual project of applying performance theory to the study of everyday life so as to transform historical knowledge. This intellectual project will take different forms in the coming years; possibilities include future ASTR Working Sessions, special issues of journals, and an NEH Seminar. The ultimate, expansive goal is to draw the fields of performance studies and history closer together so that each might transform the other.
Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief bio to both Robin Bernstein < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it > and Kyla Wazana Tompkins < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it > by May 31. Feel free to email Robin or Kyla with questions prior to the deadline.
Format: Before the conference, we will organize participants into small sub-groups (including no more than four participants) to encourage dialogue across differences in discipline, theoretical approach, geographical focus, and historical period. In early October, participants will circulate short papers (8-10 pages) to all members of the Working Session. Participants will read all the papers and will prepare comments for the members of the sub-group. At ASTR, we will convene as a large group, then split into sub-groups to discuss the papers in depth, and then re-convene as one large group.
SESSION RATIONALE:
Given the breadth of Hearsay Rules and this working session’s interest in the total variety of oral and aural histories and historians in theatre and performance history, this session is interested in papers that engage with or use: interviews, storytelling, audio recordings and recording technologies, songs, speeches, debates, podcasts, transcripts of legal proceedings, telephony, religious traditions and rituals, children’s games and songs, and more.
We welcome papers that engage with the following questions:
In citing both the orality and the aurality of history, this working session is interested in those voices that speak to us in a variety of documented and undocumented means as well as those historians or conduits that hear history for us. Thus, those who hear and those who say.
PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS
Coordinated by the New Paradigms in Graduate Education Committee
In its second year of sessions at ASTR, the New Paradigms in Graduate Education committee seeks to expand the dialogue on how MA and PhD programs can creatively re-imagine their curricula and structure in order to best prepare students for the profession. This entails much more than simply producing “marketable” candidates. Every student admitted to every graduate program is a potential future contributor to the field. How can faculty ensure that students receive a thorough grounding in the disciplines of theatre history, theory, performance studies, and practice – and in a context that integrates rather than divides these diverse aspects of our field? How can faculty re-calibrate their MA or PhD programs to maximize students’ experience in synthesizing scholarship and practice, and to prepare them for the widest possible range of career choices post-graduation? Where are the opportunities for productive collaboration between MA/MFA programs that incorporate production training with their PhD counterparts? With changes on the horizon, and with feedback from the membership suggesting that integrating additional production work into doctoral program training might help to create better-prepared, more versatile members of the field, a session inviting graduate students, faculty, and professionals to brainstorm on options for the future seems timely.
This session invites ASTR members to submit papers on the current state of the relationship between scholarship and practice in graduate education, or possible models for re-thinking the relationship between scholarship and practice in graduate education. Models may be based on current best-practices at a particular institution or on a “wish-list” for the future. Authors should consider the following:
This session invites ASTR members to submit papers on the current state of the relationship between scholarship and practice in graduate education, or possible models for re-thinking the relationship between scholarship and practice in graduate education. Models may be based on current best-practices at a particular institution or on a “wish-list” for the future. Papers should be at least 12-14 pages in length.
We will create a Blackboard site for papers to be posted in advance, and we will invite colleagues to respond and pose questions concerning the proposals. We will use the two-hour session at the 2012 ASTR conference to extend our conversation and to discuss/develop the themes and models presented (in collaboration with any spectators). The goal will be to emerge with different models and thought-pieces on this issue that can be made available to the membership either via ASTR Online or through an essay in a scholarly journal.
Please submit 300-word proposals and contact information to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it no later than May 31, 2012. Please use the heading: “ASTR WORKING GROUP PROPOSAL 2012” in the email subject line.
Objects and Things: The Histories of Theatrical Actants Convened by Marlis Schweitzer, York University ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Joanne Zerdy, Penn State Erie ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
We are keen to explore a “remembrance of things past,” to chart the on- and offstage lives of the things that comprise, support, and enact theatrical performances (e.g. props, puppets, design elements, venue architectures, texts, transportation vehicles, etc.). By adopting a thingcentric perspective, outlined by political theorist Jane Bennett and social scientists working in actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, we aim to rethink theatre histories from the perspective of such things. We understand physical materials not as inert human possessions but instead as actants, with particular frequencies, energies, and potentials to affect the human and nonhuman worlds in which they exist. This group seeks to build on extant performance and theatre studies scholarship that foregrounds the interdependence of organisms, objects, physical forces, ideas, and social practices. With this in mind, we invite performance and theatre practitioners and scholars to consider the contours of their work in terms of the “vibrant matter” of theatrical things. Papers might address the following questions:
Session Format:
Following the selection of participants, conveners will generate initial discussion questions and a bibliography of sources with which participants will be expected to engage. Full 10-12-page papers will be submitted to the conveners by September 30, 2012. Smaller groups will be assigned and expected to interact with one another (through email, phone, and/or Skype) before the ASTR meeting in November. Conveners will distribute a set of discussion questions and/or a working session agenda by late October. We also plan to coordinate a follow-up discussion online, initiated by questions devised by the conveners from our meeting in Nashville.
Conveners: Charlotte McIvor (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Emine Fisek (Johns Hopkins University)
What is the relationship between performance and migration? Performances that narrate the experiences of people on the move, whether refugees or asylum seekers, immigrants following established diasporic routes, or seasonal laborers undertaking journeys fueled by a globalized economy, have appeared of late in a variety of aesthetic and social practices from the work of Los Angeles-based Teatro Jornalero sin Fronteras to Fire and Ice’s Asylum Monologues in the UK to Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail. Yet an emphasis on the contemporariness of the relationship between performance practice and migration risks obscuring the broader implications of this phenomenon. First, it discounts theatrical histories of migration that fall outside the boundaries of theoretical vocabularies developed largely as a way of accounting for the late-modern increase in the circulation of peoples. Second, an exclusively contemporary focus conceals the role that the notion of performance has consistently served off the stage and in the social life of migration, national citizenship itself being, as May Joseph argues, a “performed site of personhood” (Nomadic Identities, 4).
The goal of this working session is to explore the implications of this broadened understanding of performance and migration for the historiographical and methodological tools available to scholars of theatre and performance. What are the specific methodological challenges that migration poses for theatre historiography and an understanding of the global circulation of performance aesthetics and practices over time? In what particular ways must both archival and field methods in theatre and performance studies adapt themselves to the study of migration? What are the ethics of practicing ethnography alongside subjects of varied legal status? How do the migratory experiences of theatre artists account for their aesthetic technique and thematic concerns? How might tracking distinct or clustered migratory experiences help refine a map of world theatre typically reliant on regional divisions?
Format: Members of the group will read selections from texts including D. Soyini Madison’s Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics and Performance and Charlotte Canning and Thomas Postlewait’s edited collection Representing the Past: Essays on Theatre Historiography during the summer of 2012 which will serve as reference points in the writing of their own, methodologically-conscious, 10-12 page papers. These papers will be circulated among group members by October 1st, after which point participants will exchange feedback and comments with members of their “small group”, scholars with whom their work shares a theoretical, methodological or geographical context. During our conference session we will merge these small conversations with the group’s broader interests regarding performance and migration, working to link participants’ concrete examples and challenges to the broader theoretical questions occasioned by the relationship between these two terms.
Please submit an abstract proposing a particular case study that engages these methodological questions in relationship to performance and migration (500 words) and a brief bio (200 words) to Charlotte McIvor ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Emine Fisek ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) by Thursday, May 31st, 2012.
What the Middle Means: New Histories of Medieval Performance Culture
Co-convenors: Jenna Soleo-Shanks, Briar Cliff University, and Lofton L. Durham, Western Michigan University
Perhaps no period in performance history demonstrates the interconnections of history and theatre so well as the Middle Ages. In the era spanning the end of the Roman theatre tradition and the advent of the Renaissance playhouse, performance was the medium judged best to record, revise, and re-tell histories both cosmic and quotidian. From sweeping mystery cycles and sacred dramas, to civic festivals that staged local heroes and happenings, history in the Middle Ages was played out in spaces private, public, sacred, and profane for a thousand years before Shakespeare wrote a "history play." Moreover, these histories were staged alongside and in connection with virtually every aspect of public life. Thus medieval performances were never separate from the public discourse, rather they formed an important part of it.
Yet, the history of performance in the Middle Ages remains a vexed topic. Despite valuable recent contributions in the area, consensus on the meaning and significance of "the middle" remains elusive. Until we find a new paradigm to define and explore medieval performance we cannot hope to realize the fullness of theatre history in the Middle Ages. This working session seeks to investigate and critique the writing of performance history in the thousand years usually labeled "the Middle Ages." How has the historiography of this period enhanced our understanding of it? How has it blunted it? What perspectives and/or questions open up the relationship between history and theatre? How do we characterize, define, and investigate medieval performance traditions in terms of the unique and vital functions these traditions held within their own time? What new kinds of evidence are available? What methodologies reveal new connections? What are the implications of recent research on notions of medieval history? And finally, what kinds of new narratives of medieval performance history do we need?
Please email a 250-300 word abstract, addressing these or other related questions, to session co-conveners Lofton Durham ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and Jenna Soleo-Shanks ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), by THURSDAY MAY 31, 2012. Abstracts should be geared to produce essays of between 8 and 10 pages in length. Essays will be grouped thematically and will form the foundation for structured discussions online before the conference, as well as fruitful exchange in Nashville designed to allow participation by session members and audience alike.
Sense, Affect, and Being Singular Plural
José Muñoz, NYU Performance Studies,
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This working group seeks participants that employ affect theory to engage questions of difference in performance. We are particularly interested in projects that articulate a minoritarian performance studies mode of analysis and engage with the recent turn toward a materialist genealogy of affectible bodies. From the classical ‘clinamen’ to the Enlightenment ‘affectus’ to modernist sensibility to postmodern sensitivity, there has arguably always been a radical strand of materialism that has aligned itself against positivist and dogmatic realisms, and that engages variously with the work of Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze, Nancy, and Rancière; we are interested in projects that illuminate connections between such materialisms and the matter of performance, taking ‘matter’ in an expanded an vibrant sense that avoids subject-object binarisms. How might affect studies offer insight into the performance of difference that universalist or other empiricist approaches occlude?
Possible topics include: vitalism; obscurantism; irritability; bad sentiments; minor feelings, moods, and counter-moods; affective mapping; speculative genres; weird realisms; etc.
Participants will submit works-in-progress (12-15pp) four weeks prior to the conference. Organizers will group submissions around topics/theorists, and structure an advance email conversation over common issues underlying each approach/grouping. Each group will develop a joint presentation (15 min.) to be delivered at the session, to be followed by group discussion.
Applicants should submit abstracts by email attachment to all of the working group conveners: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by May 31, 2012.
Staging Time, Timing History As we think through these questions and related ones, we invite members of the working session to focus on a performance practice or idiom—broadly understood, across a range of genres, forms, and media—that illuminates the risks and rewards of thinking about time together with (or pointedly apart from) history. We also invite participants to engage with recent theoretical work, especially in queer studies, performance studies, and cultural studies, that has put time front and center in scholarly thinking and writing. What are the gains of this turn toward time, and what are its limits or deficits? Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief bio to both Nick Salvato <
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> and John Muse <
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> by May 31. Feel free to email Nick or John with questions prior to the deadline. Format:
TRAUMATIC STRUCTURES WORKING GROUP Co-Conveners:
Aaron C. Thomas
Please send 300-word abstract and brief professional bio to Mary Karen Dahl and Aaron C. Thomas by May 31, 2012. Differentiating humans from other violent animals that have memory, philosopher J. Glenn Gray proposed in 1970 that we alone can “inhabit . . . memories.” Our “memory” can “transform past, present, and future.” Another differentiating feature is imagination, which “enables us to live outside ourselves in space as memory enables us to live outside the present in time.” It is a capacity for “self-surpassing” that lets us imagine another’s experience or a future for ourselves. Trauma studies addresses the dis-ease generated at individual and societal levels by woundings that disrupt or pervert such fundamental human capacities. It searches out means of restoring [re-storying] broken histories through imaginative acts. Addressing the conference theme this year, the Traumatic Structures Working Group asks that proposals consider both the historiography and the theatricality of traumatic experience:
Finally, our group seeks to investigate the ways in which trauma involves gaps in remembering, involuntarily re-experiencing events so that one is caught in a loop that spontaneously replays the past and immerses the subject in his or her history. The work of living after having experienced trauma seems to revolve around capturing or productively re-imagining history (of self, of family, of nation). While contributions drawing on Freudian approaches are welcome, we also seek proposals dealing with non-western or non-Freudian theories of trauma that expand our understanding of approaches to cultural woundings. Proposals should address the theoretical perspectives of the applicant. Members contribute 10-page papers to the group. Using a secure electronic site, all members read and respond to all papers in advance of ASTR. Based on these exchanges, the group collectively constructs the agenda for our 3-hour face-to-face discussion. The group may visit memorial sites in Nashville in advance of our session.
We anticipate final decisions will be made and participants will be notified by the end of June. Please note that ASTR guidelines ask that individuals apply to only one working session. All participants will need to be members of ASTR.
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