ASTR 2012 Working Sessions

Friday, November 2, 2012
2 - 4 p.m.

WS (1): Ecology and/of/in Performance Working Group: Trans-cultural, Trans-national, Trans-species Histories in Performance

Conveners
Theresa May, University of Oregon, Eugene, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Nelson Gray, University of Victoria, Victoria, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
In recent years ecocritics have become increasingly cognizant that writing about performance and ecology means thinking beyond borders vis-à-vis cultures, nations and species. In this working group on ecology and performance, the focus will be on understanding how ecocentric, place-based concerns intersect with issues of environmental justice in a global context and ecological transformations that are taking place on a planetary scale. Participants in this working group, by sharing papers and dialogue, will address questions such as the following:

• How do transcultural and transnational performances re-map our understanding of what May has called “ecodramaturgy”?
• What constitutes “theatre of species” (Chaudhuri) and how might these trans-species performances rearrange or reinterpret understandings of representation?
• How do the material characteristics of artistic sites condition the aesthetics of the work produced and how do these resonate with issues of ecology and environmental justice that extend beyond these sites?
• What kinds of geological and geographical histories emerge alongside socio-cultural storytelling?
• How do intersecting histories – indigenous, place-based, community-driven – play out on stage in performance?
• How do ecological transitions, transmigrations, transmutations, transformations and transference shape artistic practice and meaning-making in the theatre?
• What possibilities does performance provide for trans-cultural, trans-species, and trans-national community building?

WS (2): Staging Time, Timing History
The conveners have provided special instructions for this session. View them here.

Conveners
John Muse, University of Chicago, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Nick Salvato, Cornell University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
This working session aims to approach the conference’s guiding issues of historicizing theatre and theatricalizing historiography through a rubric related to but distinct from history: temporality. How is time negotiated, developed, cultivated, experienced, even changed in the theatre and in related forums for live and mediated performance? Is theatrical time absorptive, extensile, outside of ordinary time, or something else altogether? What is duration, exactly, and how durable are prevailing or commonsense ideas about duration? What is the relationship between speed (or slowness) and duration (or its lack), and how do meditations on velocity, dilation, and contraction help us to refine or renovate theories of performance? Just as important, how do ideas about time shape theater history, and theater as history? When in addressing history are we really thinking about time, and when in thinking about time are we—or should we be—considering history?

At the session, each of four subgroups will give a ten-minute presentation including a one-minute peer summary of each paper, a summary of the online discussion, and a discussion question for the seminar. A discussion period of fifteen to twenty minutes will follow each presentation. We will open the conversation to auditors in the final twenty minutes.

WS (3): Everyday Life: Histories of the Ordinary, Persistent, and Repeated

Conveners
Robin Bernstein, Harvard University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Pomona College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
In this ASTR Working Session on the topic of the everyday, we focus on performance in everyday life so as to think historically about the past and the present, as well as to theorize the future as it unfolds within both. This Session proposes that the study of performance in everyday life has the potential to revise and reconfigure historical knowledge. 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?

The working group will focus on theatre and performance in multinational context and in terms of transnational movements. The conveners imagine this session 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 connects to a Harvard University Charles Warren Center seminar of a similar title; possible future incarnations 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.

WS (4): Indigenous Performance Research in the Americas: Indigenous Histories and the Performance of Reconciliation
The conveners have provided special instructions for this session. View them here.
 

Conveners
Stephanie Lein Walseth, University of Minnesota, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Ann Haugo, Illinois State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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:

• How does indigenous performance in the Americas perform the work of reconciliation, if it can be said to do so? Does this work have global parallels in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the broader Pacific, or elsewhere?
• For whom is reconciliation performed?
• How might reconciliation involve re-writing dominant narratives, re-righting historical injustices, or re-riting marginalized cosmologies?
• What are the relationships between reconciliation, truth, trauma, healing, and justice in regards to indigenous histories?
• In what manner can the idea of reconciliation allow indigenous performance to enact hope while not erasing the wounds of historical trauma, rupture, and loss?

WS (5): What the Middle Means: New Histories of Medieval Performance Culture

Conveners
Lofton L. Durham, Western Michigan University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Jenna Soleo-Shanks, Briar Cliff University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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 one of the media judged best to record, revise, and re-tell histories both cosmic and quotidian. 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 or blunted our understanding of it? 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?

WS (6): Contaminating Bodies, Infectious Spectacles, Troubling Histories: Women on Performative Display
The conveners have provided special instructions for this session. View them here.

Conveners
Jill Stevenson, Marymount Manhattan College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Jen-Scott Mobley, Rollins College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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.

WS (7): Blurring the Lines: Scholarship, Practice, and Professional Preparation

Conveners
Coordinated by the New Paradigms in Graduate Education Committee
Chrystyna Dail, Ithaca College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Amy Hughes, Brooklyn College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Suk-Young Kim, University of California, Santa Barbara, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Sharon Mazer, University of Canterbury, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Heather S. Nathans, University of Maryland, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
New Paradigms email address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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? This session invites participants to discuss the current relationship between scholarship and practice in graduate education, as well as possible models for re-thinking these relationships in the future.

WS (8): Working between Theatre Studies and Dance Studies

Conveners
Susan Manning, Northwestern University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Nadine George-Graves, University of California, San Diego, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Tara Rodman, Northwestern University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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.
 

We will consider questions including: How “theatre” in one place becomes “dance” in another; How we analyze the artist who works in both media; How collaboration of artists and fusion of cultures challenge disciplinary divides; How a performance history can be differently accessed depending on the scholar’s use of a theatrical or dance-based approach; How “archive and repertoire,” or the concept of “history” changes between dance and theatre studies; How studying dance puts pressure on assumptions or ideas common to the field of theatre history, and vice versa; and how differing methods used in the production of theatre and dance (the play text vs. the dance scenario, the process of revival vs. reconstruction, dramaturgy, etc.) affect scholarship.

6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

WS (9): Eighteenth Century Theatrical Histories, or, the Long, the Deep, and the Wide
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Jennifer Kokai, Weber State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Daniel Smith, Michigan State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
The eighteenth century has been a vibrant field of scholarship in theatre and performance studies and has been well-represented at ASTR in recent years. Theatre and performance have also been keywords in recent scholarly approaches to social and cultural history of the eighteenth century, with analyses of the performance of monarchy and of theatrical subjectivity seeking to explain political events. Playing on adjectives prevalent in Eighteenth Century Studies, we want to explore how the words Long, Deep, and Wide might help “cast” the theatrical history of the 18th century we construct. We are particularly interested in 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?” How do current theories on gender, race, sexuality, affect, or spectatorship help us deepen our understanding of the 18th century? How might we widen our notion of fixed geographical categories usefully? What effect do terms like “global” and “transatlantic” have on our understanding of eighteenth-century theatrical histories? What does lengthening our scope of exploration and thinking about continuations and ruptures help us to discover? How did eighteenth-century theatrical practices reflect on or appropriate earlier (and later) periods? Using a variety of research methodologies, participants analyze such case studies as pregnant actresses on the British stage, Neo-Latin Jesuit theatre, early American musical drama, French libertine performances, and German interpretations of Elizabethan England.

WS (10): Objects and Things: The Histories of Theatrical Actants

Conveners
Marlis Schweitzer, York University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Joanne Zerdy, Independent Scholar, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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. The following questions will guide our discussion: How do things perform? What kinds of agencies, energies, and directions do they enact in theatre in the past and present? What new or overlooked theatre history narratives might emerge from a thingcentric approach? What theoretical frameworks and methodologies do theatre and performance scholars employ when they look at and respond to things? How do theatrical things direct our critical and creative attention toward, away from, and within archival research? How might we begin to map the different genealogies that inform thingcentric scholarship today?

WS (11): Performing War: Theatrical Histories

Conveners
Katie Egging, Union College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Jenna L. Kubly, Independent Scholar, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

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:

• How has war affected the writing of theatre history? What histories/archives/documents/performances have been lost because of war and battle?
• Has war-time created new audiences or new stages?
• By whom and for whom are plays about or during war? (Soldiers? POWs? Civilians?)
• How has theatre contributed to “writing” and “righting” histories of war? What voices have been heard because of performance?
• What dramatic works have become part of the “standard” repertoire of war-time plays? What contributes to their canonization?
• What is the result of resituating a non-war play to a war zone? Do aesthetic practices, spectator expectations, or the contemporary sociopolitical climate contribute to these re-imaginings?
• How does war on stage affect, contribute to, or detract from, monuments and memorials of war? How has theatre been employed in reconciliation efforts in war/post-war zones?

WS (12): “Hear/Say”: Aural and Oral Histories of Theatre and Performance

Conveners
Sam O’Connell, Worcester State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Harvey Young, Northwestern University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
The soundscape of history provides a rich case study for investigating the role of the historian, the nature of the historical evidence, and the trustworthiness of that evidence. Whether we are dealing with sound recordings or oral testimony, acoustic evidence is subject to the mistrust facing oral testimony in courts of law and Hearsay Rules, which can be applied to written or oral statements, gestures, and even silence.

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.

Papers in this session engage with the following questions:

• What counts as evidence in creating oral histories?
• What is required and expected of the oral historian in receiving and translating testimony?
• How do such theories as Archive and Repertoire affect our current understanding of acoustic evidence in theatre history?
• How do plays and playwrights engage with both the orality and aurality of the past?
• To what extent does the passage of time effect the trustworthiness of acoustic, historical evidence?
• How do theatre and performance artists incorporate the oral remains of history in their work?
• What role does the oral historian play in shaping and interpreting the past?

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.

WS (13): Performance and (Bio)politics: From Liveness to Life

Conveners
Sara Brady, Bronx Community College/City University of New York, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Gabriella Calchi Novati, Trinity College Dublin, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
The Performance and (Bio)politics working session will explore points of contact between performance and biopolitics in contemporary theory, by looking at the ways in which the critical discourse has shifted from a focus on “liveness” to one on “life.” The working session seeks to understand what theatre and performance studies scholars can learn from a critical inquiry into biopolitics in order to examine the ways in which “life” seems to have become the main currency of contemporary politics. 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 theatre, cinema, art, and performances in everyday life (e.g., medicine, law, and science). From performances of state power to bio-art; from political theatre and performative protests to the contemporary revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street; from euthanasia, abortion, and in-vitro fertilization to the problematic definition of individual “rights,” the group proposes to untangle how some of the issues at stake in biopolitical discourse are actually permeating—perhaps unnoticed—our everyday life and popular imagination to the extent that performances of life and performances over life have become the political means of power, empowerment, and disempowerment.

WS (14): Embodied Archives: Movement, Memory, and Historiographies of the Body
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners

Jessica Berson, Harvard University; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Kirsten Pullen, Texas A&M University; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

“History” implies logos. Even when developing histories of physical performance forms that lack conventional notation systems or “texts,” scholars revert to the language of language. “Movement vocabulary,” “written on the body,” and “inscribed in gesture” are tropes used for explaining choreographic impact and movement aesthetics. Dance studies is particularly 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 and audiences: in some sense, the dance is the dancer.

This working session asks how dancing bodies construct and narrate multiple histories—social, cultural, personal, political. The dancer’s body serves as one kind of archive, whilst the perceptions of audiences offer another, interweaving “sensible” and “intelligible” understandings of movement events and experiences. 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. We explore multiple potential dance archives in this session, exploring dance and movment training, burlesque and neo-burlesque, dance re-enactment, digital dance, intersections between dance, race, sex, and gender.

WS (15): Sense, Affect, and Being Singular Plural

Conveners
José Muñoz, New York University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Tavia Nyong’o, New York University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Karen Shimakawa, New York University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
This working group investigates the usefulness of 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; papers in this working group pursue 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? Project topics include: vitalism; obscurantism; irritability; bad sentiments; minor feelings, moods, and counter-moods; affective mapping, speculative genres; weird realisms; etc.

WS (16): (Re)Positioning Latin America: Theatrical Histories and Cartographies of Power

Conveners
Jimmy A. Noriega, College of Wooster, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Analola Santana, Dartmouth College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
Historically, the Americas have been constructed through a hierarchy that moves from East to West, North to South. From the 16th and 17th 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.” Through NAFTA, neoliberal reform, the growing effects of globalization on the hemisphere, and the return to the left, theatre artists continue to challenge these historical framings. 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.

WS (17): Digital Humanities and the Performing Arts

Convener
Nancy Friedland

Session Abstract
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:

• How should we define or approach Digital Humanities for the performing arts?
• How can innovative application of Digital Humanities support teaching and learning of performing arts and cultural history?
• How do librarians, archivists, and curators promote productive, collaborative relationships with scholars, researchers, and students?
• How should libraries and archives adjust traditional practices of curation and access?
• How can libraries, museums, and archives consider and respond to shifts in scholarship to remain relevant?
• How are we reimagining the library and archive?
• How can we apply new developments in arts technologies to reinvent research and scholarship?
• How will emerging technologies impact existing publishing models?
• How should we educate future professional librarians and archivists in Digital Humanities: technologies, applications, teaching and learning requisites?
• What kind of information technology skill sets should we develop to adapt to these transformations?

Saturday, November 3, 2012
8:30 – 10:30 a.m.

WS (18): Methods and Approaches: Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance, and Performance

Conveners
John Lutterbie, Stony Brook University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Amy Cook, Indiana University, Bloomington, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

The research group in Cognitive Science in Theatre, Dance and Performance will discuss 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? In this 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 our papers and session, we have asked each participant to examine one of four essays at the intersection of cognitive science and the arts/humanities by F. Elizabeth Hart, Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, Eve Sweetser, or Evelyn Tribble.

WS (19) Undercover: New Approaches to Plays from the Spanish Golden Age through Hidden Histories of Women and Native Americans
The convener has provided special instructions. View them here.

Convener
Ben Gunter, Theater with a Mission, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
Plays from the Spanish Golden Age – still one of theater’s best-kept secrets – can unsettle official histories by vibrantly presenting underdog viewpoints. This working session infiltrates a pair of noncanonical comedias which slyly raise questions about the status quo by placing Native Americans and women at center stage.

1. In Valor, agravio y mujer (c. 1640), playwright Ana Caro (c. 1600–1652) illuminates the undercover history of famous female playwrights during the Siglo de Oro, and protagonist Leonor (a/k/a Leonardo) mounts a feminist counterattack on Don Juan. How do Caro and her heroine open new horizons for research, shedding light on theater-making during the Spanish Golden Age and raising implications for staging and teaching today? How does translation by Amy Williamsen (Courage, Betrayal, and a Woman Scorned, 2010) and editing for production by Ian Borden (Agravio, 2012) equip this play for resurgence in America?
2. El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colón (c. 1600) is the first play in history to put Native Americans on stage – an extravaganza by Lope de Vega (1562-1635) that zeroes in on the causes and consequences of first contact between Europe and America. How do Nuevo mundo’s Amerindian characters interrogate theater’s capacity to challenge expectations about aliens, explode stereotypes, and promote human rights? How can translation for Florida’s quincentennial (1513-2013) make this play a springboard for everyday citizens to engage in cultural rediscovery?

Teams of modern language experts and theater scholars dig into these undercover histories and develop dynamic new approaches to teaching, staging, and researching them. Special features include user-friendly guides newly posted to a wiki (offering approaches to researching critical hotspots, suggestions for classroom activities, and pointers for putting the script into production), and staged readings of target scenes that put research findings into practice, stimulate discussion, and enhance ASTR with performance elements.

WS (20): Ephemerality/Influence: Genealogies of Alternative British Theatre
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Brian EG Cook, Independent Scholar, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Sara Freeman, University of Puget Sound, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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.

WS (21): Digital Histories and Taxonomic Shifts
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Jen Parker-Starbuck, Roehampton University, London, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
David Saltz, University of Georgia, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
The burgeoning field of “multimedia performance” demands new vocabularies to contextualize recent collaborations between performance artists and software designers, scientists, animators, and filmmakers. As this growing field encompasses rapidly expanding digital archives, theatre and performance scholars must not merely document and analyze the performances, but situate them within larger contexts. “Multimedia performance” is itself a contested term, and scholars and artists have begun to identify and investigate more specific uses of media in performance. This seminar aims to explore the increasingly fluid cohabitations among performance and (especially digital) media, investigating the multiple taxonomic shifts occurring within the genre.

This seminar focuses on how this notion of “taxonomy,” understood broadly as the science of classification, might be applied to the diversity and evolution of multimedia performance. As a working group we seek to investigate multiple possible formations for taxonomies of multimedia performance. We are interested in exploring questions such as: What are the taxonomic models available for analyzing multimedia performance explorations? What are the most productive categories for this analysis? What are the relevant relations among performing bodies and the objects of technology? If contemporary performance is becoming increasingly invested with its own documentation (often as performance), how can we analyze these documents as theatre history? What theoretical and practical methods are available to expand the field of media and performance?

The seminar participants examine media and performance from a theoretical perspective, and/or use media in ways that reinforce, challenge, or shift existing definitions of “multimedia performance.”

WS (22): “Experiments in Democracy:" Performing an Interracial and Multicultural America, 1900-1950
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Cheryl Black, University of Missouri, Columbia, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Jonathan Shandell, Arcadia University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
The theme for this session 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. Participants will bring 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, examining the ways in which these practices have both challenged and sustained racial apartheid and white privilege.

*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.

WS (23): Performing Age

Convener:
Elinor Fuchs, Yale School of Drama, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract:
More than a decade ago, cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette wrote that Age was “still in the state that gender and race used to be in: hidden by its supposed foundation in ‘the body.’” Since then, the rapidly growing field of Age Studies has become an interdisciplinary conversation that includes cultural gerontology, sociology, anthropology, bioethics, and a range of approaches springing from the humanities and the arts. Theatre and Performance Studies have only just begun to join this conversation. This Working Session will raise questions and seek new perspectives: Why has Age/youth escaped the creative scrutiny from theatre and performance scholars that other bio-cultural markers received in the identity debates of the last decades? Why is Age so often polarized between narratives of “success” or decline? Why is Age so often stripped of subjectivity and performed as spectacle ? How is Age performed across comparative cultures and periods? Is there a dramaturgy of Age? How do ageism and stereotyping shape performances of Age? This session hopes for a wide-ranging discussion aimed at the intersection of Age and Performance, with perspectives from dance, theater, cultural studies and popular media.

WS (24): If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When? Embodiment, Engagement, and the Pedagogy of Performance
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Jane Barnette, Kennesaw State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Henry Bial, University of Kansas, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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.

WS (25): Interrogating the Romance of Community Theater and Performance

Conveners

Michelle Baron, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Catherine Ming T'ien Duffly, Reed College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
This working group investigates the potential and problematics of “community” through an examination of theatrical forms and social engagements that could be considered "community theater" in all of the various forms and guises that term has taken. This group 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, 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).

WS (26): Theatre Survey Article Workshop

Convener
Leo Cabranes-Grant, University of California, Santa Barbara, (Editor, Theatre Survey), This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Esther Kim Lee, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, (Associate Editor, Theatre Survey), This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

Translation is, by definition, an intercultural practice. In spite of our commitment to world theatre, the translator’s work is still considered marginal in many graduate programs, and competence in English is expected during many of our global conferences.The main goal of this working session is to develop fully publishable, scholarly articles focusing on issues of translation and its impact on the fostering, understanding, and analysis of events and exchanges in the fields of dramatic literature and performance. Some of the issues to be discussed are: the role of translation in the history of dramatic texts and theatrical practices; translation as a tool in the research of performative traditions and activities; the study of translational interventions that take place during a performance or a situation (like the use of sign language, or the presence of law court interpreters); the post-colonial relevance of translation; and the particular challenges (theoretical, pragmatic, and commercial) confronted by translators.

5:15 - 8 p.m.

WS (27): Migration and Performance: Questions of Methodology and Historiography

Conveners
Charlotte McIvor, National University of Ireland-Galway, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Emine Fisek, Bogazici University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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 Jornelaro 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. In what particular ways must both archival and field methods in theatre and performance studies adapt themselves to the study of migration?

WS (28): Performance as Research and Practice Based Research: Historic, Current, and Forthcoming

Conveners
Daniel Mroz, University of Ottawa, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Kris Salata, Florida State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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.

WS (29): Shakespearean Performance Research Group
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Catherine Burriss, California State University, Channel Islands, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Franklin J. Hildy, University of Maryland, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Rob Ormsby, Memorial University, Newfoundland, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Don Weingust, Southern Utah University / Utah Shakespeare Festival, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
W. B. Worthen, Barnard College, Columbia University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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 feature 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 Nashville conference, including 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. Research Group papers have tended to address questions of practical theatre, specific issues in history and historiography, and theoretical concerns. We seek a wide range of engagements with Shakespeare and performance. Papers are assigned to subgroups by the group’s conveners who also 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.

WS (30): Traumatic Structures

Conveners
Mary Karen Dahl, Florida State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Aaron C. Thomas, Dartmouth College, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
Trauma studies addresses the dis-ease generated at individual and societal levels by woundings that disrupt or pervert fundamental human capacities. It searches out means of restoring [re-storying] broken histories through imaginative acts. The Traumatic Structures Working Group addresses the conference theme directly by inquiring into historiographic approaches to trauma and how shifts in trauma historiography might inform current approaches to the writing of traumatic histories. Our group also asks how performances that address traumatic experience treat spectatorship, audience identification, and affective experience, and what new modes of spectatorship these performances propose. We will also interrogate the ethics of performing traumatic histories and the ethics of writing the histories of performance that treat trauma theatrically.

Members contribute 10-page papers. Using a secure electronic site, all members read and respond to all papers in advance of our ASTR meeting in November. Based on these exchanges, the group collectively constructs the agenda for our three-hour face-to-face discussion. At the conference we draw on our close-readings of the papers to think out loud together. This format, originated at the group’s inaugural meeting in 2010 and continued at the 2011 conference, promotes in-depth collective thinking that sparks insights in the event, has strengthened individual research and performance projects, and is stimulating new directions in trauma studies.

WS (31): Unsafe Realism 2.0: Rethinking Feminist Realisms

Conveners
Roberta Barker, Dalhousie University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ;
Kim Solga, Queen Mary University of London, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
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?

WS (32): Culture, Citizenship, and Mass Spectacle

Conveners
Kimberly Jannarone, University of California, Santa Cruz, ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Keren Zaiontz, Queen Mary University of London ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Session Abstract
This seminar addresses how mass spectacle mobilizes citizens to express modes of cultural belonging. Papers 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 the unofficial gathering of illegal citizens 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.

WS (33): Global Theatre Histories - Exploring a New Research Paradigm
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners
Christopher B. Balme, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich
Nic Leonhardt, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract
In the larger field of historical studies, for the past decade numerous European, American and Asian scholars have challenged conventional methods of writing history by applying a global/ transcultural/ transnational perspective to their objects of study that go beyond or even leave behind national boundaries. In the recent discourse on global and transnational history there are various nominations of similar approaches that all peer the relational dimension of history: This relational dimension is reflected in approaches called as histoire croisée, “connected history”, transnational history, or entangled histories.

Although entanglements and connections have always been an important part of history and are a rule rather than an 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 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, e.g.: finding the object and focus of research, balancing the „local“ and „the global“, applying a multitude of approaches and research methods, dealing with unusual and multilingual corpus of source material and resources, and the demand of re-considering teaching theatre history.

WS (34): Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter
The conveners have provided special instructions. View them here.

Conveners

Rosemarie Bank, Kent State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Michal Kobialka, University of Minnesota, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

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 “Call for Papers:

• How might we think critically about contemporary and past historiographical methodologies used to write theatrical and performance histories
• How might we resituate theorizations of the archive, periodization, and the past within our research
• How might the ethical implications of writing theatrical histories complicate the historiographical imperative in our current sociopolitical context?

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.

WS (35): Special Session on New Paradigms in Graduate Education - “Heading Back to the Future: Theatre Histories, Graduate Training, and New Paradigms in Graduate Education”

Convener
Heather Nathans, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Session Abstract

The 2012 New Paradigms plenary session explores specific issues of curriculum and training. Our speakers will also collaborate with the audience to devise specific strategies for advocacy and engagement in an era when so many scholars have been demoralized by budget cutbacks, straitened job markets, and a seemingly epidemic public devaluation of the arts and humanities.

Speakers:
J. Ellen Gainor, Cornell University
Thomas Postlewait, University of Washington
E.J. Westlake, University of Michigan
Charlotte Canning, University of Texas-Austin (respondent)