ASTR 2012: Theatrical Histories
Deadline: 31 January 2012

Conference Chairs:

Patrick Anderson, University of California, San Diego
Patricia Ybarra, Brown University

Theatre is historical; history is theatrical.

These twin claims gesture to the intimate imbrication of practices that constitute theatrical production and the lived realities of social life. As a set of staged practices rich with social context, theatre seeks to document, engage, and affect the communities by and for whom it is produced. As a lineage of presence, history stages itself as monument and memorial, as genealogy of both survival and loss, as the always-shifting (always live and present) remembrance of things past. Theatre implicates history in its economy of representation; history implicates theatre in its economy of remembering. Theatricality and historiography are likewise linked as methodologies of negotiating the tensions between past and present; real and representational; aesthetic and scholarly practices. Meant to engage debate outside of polarizing generalizations about the field, this conference asks scholars and practitioners to re-examine "theatrical histories" in the widest possible sense at a moment of crisis in humanities scholarship within global economies of value.

Consciously broad, the 2012 conference theme is intended to encourage plenary and working group proposals from theater historians and practitioners, performance scholars and theorists, and everyone between and beyond those designations. The Program Committee invites proposals from scholars and practitioners working in any field, and on any era or form of performance history, broadly construed, whose work engages critical questions including but not limited to:

• How might we think critically about contemporary and past historiographical methodologies used to write theatrical and performance histories?
• How might debates among performance scholars about mediation and liveness contribute to critical historiographical practices?
• How might we think about circulations of affect and modes of spectatorship in theatrical histories?
• How might we resituate theorizations of the archive and the repertoire, of periodization and the past, within our research on theatrical histories?
• How might the ethical implications of writing theatrical histories complicate the historiographical imperative in our current sociopolitical context?

Plenary Presentations: We invite proposals for individual plenary papers and/or presentations. These presentations are “plenary” in the sense that they address the entire conference and nothing runs concurrently with them. Proposals should take the form of an abstract (max. 250 words) that includes name, affiliation, mailing and email addresses. Full-length papers will not be accepted. Individual presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Those whose proposals are not selected for plenary presentations will have the opportunity to apply to a second call for participants in accepted working sessions.

Working Sessions: We invite proposals for working sessions. This category includes roundtables, seminars, research groups, reading groups, forums, workshops, as well as formats that have yet to be imagined. “Working sessions” is a general category that allows the session leader(s) to convene small groups around a proposed area of inquiry or practice, and to structure a method and format that best suits the goals of the group. No formats will be privileged over others; all proposals will be given equal consideration according to their merit. Proposals should include a rationale for the subject of the session and for its format, and must be accompanied by the “ASTR/TLA Working Sessions Proposal Form.” Proposals related to the conference theme are particularly welcome, but not necessary. Once the program committee has made its selection of working sessions, each session convener will be invited to issue a specialized call for participants for that session; this second round of calls for participants in working sessions will be posted on the ASTR and TLA websites, with a late May deadline for submission.

Visit this page for more information about ASTR working sessions.

All submissions must be received by January 31, 2012 and should be sent as email attachments, in MS Word, to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Inquiries are welcome. Please contact Patrick Anderson and Patricia Ybarra at the gmail.com address above with program questions or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with questions about conference logistics.

Conference Directors:
Patrick Anderson (UC San Diego)
Patricia Ybarra (Brown U)

Conference Committee:
Sandra Richards (Northwestern U)
San San Kwan (UC Berkeley)
Jayna Brown (UC Riverside)
Laura Edmondson (Dartmouth)
Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State U)
Christin Essin (Vanderbilt U)
Mechele Leon (U of Kansas)
Margaret Werry (U of Minnesota)
Jon Rossini (UC Davis)
Lois Weaver (U London, Queen Mary)
Beth Kattelman (OSU) [TLA rep]
GSC rep TBD