Congratulations to ASTR member Jon D. Rossini, professor of theatre and dance at the University of California, Davis, for receiving an honorable mention for the MLA Prize in US Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his book Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama, published by the University of Michigan Press. Read more.

Patrick Anderson

Masi Asare
Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage
(Duke University Press)

Tarryn Li-Min Chun
Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China
(University of Michigan Press)

Suk-Young Kim
Millennial North Korea: Forbidden Media and Living Creatively with Surveillance
(Stanford University Press)

John Kuhn
Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England
(University of Pennsylvania Press)

Patrick McKelvey
Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation
(NYU Press)

Stephen J. Scott-Bottoms
Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance
(University of Michigan Press)

Michelle Liu Carriger

Tracy C. Davis

Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform
Cambridge University Press

Carla Della Gatta
Latinx Shakespeares: Staging U.S. Intracultural Theater
University of Michigan Press

Ioana B. Jucan
Malicious Deceivers: Thinking Machines and Performative Objects
Stanford University Press

Agata Łuksza
Polish Theatre Revisited: Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century
University of Iowa Press

Stefka G. Mihaylova
Viewers in Distress: Race, Gender, Religion, and Avant-Garde Performance at the Turn of the 21st Century
University of Michigan Press

Maya Cantu's book, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes, was published by the University of Michigan Press in January 2024.

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei's play A Wilderness of Monkeys, a revenge-comedy sequel to and reversal of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, has been translated into Mandarin Chinese by Iris Tuan. It is published in a bilingual book. ISBN 978-626-7326-28-2

Kellen Hoxworth published his book Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance with Northwestern University Press. A material history of racialized performance throughout the Anglophone imperial world, Transoceanic Blackface revises prevailing understandings of blackface and minstrelsy as distinctively US American cultural practices. Tracing intertwined histories of racialized performance from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth century across the United States and the British Empire, this study maps the circulations of blackface repertoires in theatrical spectacles, popular songs, visual materials, comic operas, closet dramas, dance forms, and Shakespearean burlesques. From the nascent theatrical cultures of Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States, Transoceanic Blackface offers critical insight into the ways racialized performance animated the imperial “common sense” of white supremacy on a global scale.

Amy Hughes was appointed Associate Director of the ADVANCE Program at University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

On September 17, 2024, Jane Barnette represented the University of Kansas in the "Meet KU Authors" event at Lawrence Public Library, where she spoke about her newest book, Witch Fulfillment: Adaptation Dramaturgy & Casting the Witch for Stage & Screen (Routledge). She has also been named a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Teaching Excellence at KU for 2024-26.

Robin Bernstein published a new book, Freeman's Challenge: The Murder that Shook America's Original Prison for Profit (U. Chicago Press). In this study of the entanglement of capitalism and incarceration in the antebellum North, Bernstein attends to tourism, stage performance, public spectacles, and forced performances inside prison.

Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University, has, since retiring in 2019, published two books: The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage and The Crooked Mirror: Plays of a Modernist Russian Cabaret as well as translations of plays by Marivaux, Balzac, Strindberg, Ferdinand Raimund, Carl Sternheim and Bertolt Brecht. Over the last five years his articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Notebook, New Theatre Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Shakespeare Studies, New England Theatre Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Modern Drama, Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter, The Dickensian, Operetta Research Center, Volupté International Journal of Decadence, Gay & Lesbian Review and in various anthologies. He wrote the program note for the Royal Opera House production of Tales of Hoffmann. He has given lectures at Yale University and the Boston Conservatory, and interviews with him appeared in TuftsNow, Mannschaft, and the Gazette of the College of Fellows the American Theatre. For the Purcell Society, he wrote and performed the narration for the Davenant Macbeth and played Duncan. He is an Executive Producer for the film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Kate Elswit and Harmony Bench were commissioned to develop a series of dance historical data visualizations for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which are on display as part of the "Edges of Ailey" exhibition, from September 2024 to February 2025.

Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage by Elizabeth T. Craft was recently published by Oxford University Press

Carol Martin (New York University) was part of the Dean’s International Lecture Series at The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University in June 2020. Her lecture was "Theatre in the Time of the Corona Virus." Other Series Speakers included Homi Bhabba and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Martin published “Under the Radar Festival, New York: Experimental, Urban and Global” in Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals edited by Ric Knowles, Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Rebecca Rovit (University of Kansas) was awarded a Humanities Resident Faculty Fellowship for Fall 2020 at KU’s Hall Center for the Humanities. The fellowship recognizes her book project, entitled “Theatre from the Rubble of War in Berlin and Vienna, 1945-55.” Dr. Rovit’s tenure on the international roster as a Fulbright Specialist on Theatre and Genocide extends through 2022.

An interview by Irina Yakubovskaya with Laurence Senelick (Emeritus, Tufts University),“Reflecting on Theatre Education and History,” appeared on-line in The Theatre Times (19 Oct. 2019). His latest book Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge UP) has just appeared in paperback. He also published "Dickens Reads in Springfield: An Eye-Witness Account" in The Dickensian (Spring 2020) and "King Henri III and his Mignons," Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (July-Aug.2020). His paper "The Nazi Occupation of Theaterwissenschaft" was one of those read for the Zoom session of the Historiography Working Group of IFTR (July 2020).

Natalie Crohn Schmitt (Emerita, University of Illinois at Chicago) received an Ennio Flaiano Award in Italianistica for Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630 (London: Routledge, 2020).

Theresa Smalec (Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Bronx Community College/CUNY) published the first book-length study of Ron Vawter, titled Ron Vawter's Life in Performance (available from Seagull Books and U of Chicago Press).

Sharon Aronofsky Weltman (Louisiana State University) published Victorians on Broadway: Literature, Adaptation, and the Modern American Musical (University of Virginia Press, 2020. Playbill named it a MUST READ summer theatre book. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late-twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886, it considers unpublished archival materials and personal interviews with Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Rowan Atkinson, Larry Fuller, and others. This book examines race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality to determine what cultural work adaptations accomplish both when they premiered and now.

Jennifer Buckley (University of Iowa) has been promoted to Associate Professor of English and Theatre Arts. Buckley's book, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print after 1900, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in Fall 2019.

This past June, Mark Cosdon (Allegheny College) guest lectured on the contemporary American musical at the University of Palermo in Sicily. At Allegheny, he directed Urinetown the Musical. As part of the faculty lecture series Mark presented "'Skin in the Game:' Hamilton, the Money Trail, and the Contemporary Broadway Musical."

Joseph Donohue (Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is please to announce his publication of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vols. IX and X, ed. Joseph Donohue: Plays 2: Lady Lancing (The Importance of Being Earnest), and Plays 3: The Importance of Being Earnest and “A Wife’s Tragedy,” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

C. David Frankel (University of South Florida) will participate in a panel on online pedagogy at the ATHE Annual Conference in August.  In addition to continuing as Assistant Director of Theatre at USF, he also leads the Tampa Repertory Theatre, an independent professional theatre now entering its ninth season.  He will be directing their production of King Lear in late spring 2020.

Kimberly Jannarone (Yale School of Drama) has accepted a new position as Professor in the Practice in the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism Program at the Yale School of Drama. She joins the faculty in July 2019. Jannarone published "Confederation and Control: Mass Gymnastics and the Czech and German Bodies Politic" in Theatre Journal, accompanied by an online "Mass Gymnastics Playlist" in Spring 2019. 

Victor Holtcamp (Tulane University) announces the release of his book: Interchangeable Parts: Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater by University of Michigan Press. In addition, he has been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at Tulane University. 

Daphne Lei (Universiy of California, Irvine) has recently published her third monograph, Uncrossing the Borders: Performing Chinese in Gendered (Trans)Nationalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan University Press, 2019).  She has also given a keynote speech at the annual conference of Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR),  University of British Columbia, Vancouver (June, 2019) and at the Chinese Culture in the Global Context Conference, Open University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (March, 2019).

Laurence Senelick (Emeritus, Tufts University) delivered "The Ever-widening Contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky" as the keynote address at the Stanislavsky Symposium in Malta (Apr. 2019).  As part of the Jacques Offenbach bicentennial, he gave two lectures: "The Offenbach Century," J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt-am-Main, and “La Périchole rouge: la mise-en-scène de Nemirovitch-Dantchenko et l’assimilation d’Offenbach a la scène soviétique,” Offenbach-Colloque, Opéra Comique, Paris (June 2019).  He published "Cyrano’s Sodomitical Circle" in Gay & Lesbian Review (July-Aug 2019). ATHE bestowed on him the Oscar Brockett Award for Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education.

David Calder (University of Manchester) published his first book, Street theatre and the production of postindustrial space: Working memories (Manchester University Press, 2019). This analysis of contemporary French street theatre explores how theatre participates in and attempts to make historical sense of the ongoing processes of deindustrialisation and redevelopment. You can order for your library or purchase from http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526121592/.

Carol Martin (New York University) published several articles: “No Heaven, Only Sky” published in Skirball’s Indefinite Articles both online and in the printed matter, 2019. "Teatr I rzeczywistość," (“Artists’ Testimonies:” Theatre and Reality”) in Dialog (in Polish), February 2019; the lead essay in the leading Polish theatre journal. “La table et le monde hors scène: les objets scéniques dans le théâtre du reel” in Les Théâtres documentaires (in French) edited by Beatrice Picon-Vallin, Montlellier, Deuxième époque, 2019. Review: Wendy Wasserstein by Jill Dolan for Theatre Journal, March 2019. In Arts Leadership, she became the Head of the ATLAS ARTS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) review panel that adjudicates fellowships for the purpose of leave time and research support for academic artists and scholars to produce art and scholarship in the public domain.

Maiya Murphy (National University of Singapore) recently published her book: Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life with Palgrave Macmillan's Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance Series: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030056148. This book examines the theatrical movement-based pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999) through the lens of the cognitive scientific paradigm of enaction. The conversation between these two both uncovers more of the possible cognitive processes at work in Lecoq pedagogy and proposes how Lecoq’s own practical and philosophical approach could have something to offer the development of the enactive paradigm. Understanding Lecoq pedagogy through enaction can shed new light on the ways that movement, key to Lecoq’s own articulation of his pedagogy, might cognitively constitute the development of Lecoq’s ultimate creative figure – the actor-creator. Through an enactive lens, the actor-creator can be understood as not only a creative figure, but also the manifestation of a fundamentally new mode of cognitive selfhood. This book engages with Lecoq pedagogy’s significant practices and principles including the relationship between the instructor and student, identifications, mime, play, mask work, language, improvisation, and movement analysis.

Heather Nathans (Tufts University) is delighted to have been accepted for the NEH Summer Institute, “Privilege and Prejudice: Jewish History in the American South," hosted by the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston.

Laurence Senelick (Tufts University) was given the Historic New England 2018 Award for Collecting Works on Paper. He has recently published “Émigré Cabaret and the Re-Invention of Russia,” New Theatre Quarterly (Feb. 2019), “Signs of the Times: Outdoor Theatrical Advertisement in the Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film (Nov. 2018) and a translation of Alexandre Dumas's Antony (Broadway Play Publishing). He wrote the narration and staged the Dryden/Davenant Tempest for the Purcell Society, and acted in a staging reading of Cary Mazer's Benefit Performance, or The Other Jew. His essay "The Queer Root of Theatre" has appeared in Polish in the queer theatre issue of Dialog (2018).

Elizabeth Son (Northwestern University) is an inaugural recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship. According to the ACLS web site, “The Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society program provides opportunities for faculty who teach and advise doctoral students to engage significant societal questions in their research, serve as ambassadors for humanities scholarship beyond the academy, and deepen their support for doctoral curricular innovation on their campuses.” As a scholar-in-residence at KAN-WIN: Empowering Women in the Asian American Community in Chicago (2019-20), Son will work on her book titled Possessing History: Korean Diasporic Women and the Performance of Persistence, which examines the interrelationship between Korean diasporic women’s experiences of social and political violence, place, and performance.

THE HAMBURG DRAMATURGY by G.E. LESSING: A NEW AND COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION is now in print from Routledge Press. The volume was translated by ASTR member Wendy Arons (Carnegie Mellon University) in collaboration with Sara Figal, edited by ASTR member Natalya Baldyga, and includes an essay by ASTR member Michael Chemers (University of California Santa Cruz).

Susan Bennett (University of Calgary) and Kim Solga (Western University) are co-editors of a new Bloomsbury Methuen series, Theory for Theatre Studies. The series features volumes that unpack keywords in the discipline through accessible and diverse case studies. Aimed primarily at senior undergraduate and graduate students, TfTS books will also make great primers for scholars branching out into new areas of research. The first two volumes, Space by Kim Solga and Sound by Susan Bennett, are published early in 2019 with volumes on emotion, economics, bodies, movement and memory forthcoming. For further information, see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/theory-for-theatre-studies/

Meredith Conti’s (University at Buffalo, SUNY) book Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine was published by Routledge in August 2018. Playing Sick reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era’s most provocative illnesses (tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness) on the late nineteenth-century stages of Britain and the United States. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. For more information or to order, visit https://www.routledge.com/Playing-Sick-Performances-of-Illness-in-the-Age-of-Victorian-Medicine/Conti/p/book/9781138703117. Conti also recently won an ASTR Research Fellowship and a University at Buffalo Gender Institute Research Fellowship for her new book project “Gunpowder Plots: A Cultural History of Firearms and the American Theatre.”

Kimberly Jannarone (UC Santa Cruz) is a Visiting Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama in Winter 2019. Her essay on systems of physical culture, "Confederation and Control: Mass Gymnastics and the Czech and German Bodies Politic,” appears in Theatre Journal in March.

Virginie Magnat (The University of British Columbia) co-edited with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston (York University) the Thematic Section “Ethnography, Performance and Imagination” for Anthropologica Volume 60 Issue 2, 2018: https://utpjournals.press/toc/anth/current. This issue features Magnat's article "Chanter la diversité culturelle en Occitanie: Ethnographie performative d’une tradition réimaginée": https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/anth.2017-0042. Magnat and Kazubowski-Houston also co-edited the Special Issue “The Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography” for Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies Vol. 18(6), 2018: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/csca/18/6, featuring Magnat's article “A Traveling Ethnography of Voice in Qualitative Research”: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532708617742407

Derek Miller (Harvard University) published his first book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 with Cambridge University Press. The book explores the implicit legal theories of the performing arts in nineteenth-century Anglo-American copyright law. Drawing on close readings of litigation and contemporary copyright debates, the book argues that copyright law creates performances as commodities by negotiating multiple theories of performance’s value. Tell your libraries and/or purchase from https://www.cambridge.org/9781108425889 with code DMILLER2018 for a 20% discount through June.

Dear members,

Please bear with me for this long letter. I ask for your patience and understanding as the Society is doing our best to handle an ongoing situation that impacts our upcoming 2018 conference.

As some of you might have heard, the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, the venue of our annual conference in San Diego, is in the midst of a strike negotiation with hotel union workers. This is part of the much larger strike against the Marriott chain (which the Westin is under) in eight cities, and the workers are asking for better pay and better working conditions. You can find more detailed information on the strike through this article.

You can also visit the Unite Here! website to learn more about the organizing and ways to support these efforts: http://unitehere.org.

The ASTR leadership has been monitoring the situation closely since the Westin workers joined the strike on October 8th. Yesterday I conducted an emergency conference call meeting with the Executive Committee and 2018 Program Chairs (Kirsten Pullen, Christin Essin, and Chase Bringardner). Based upon that call, we would like to update the membership about the current situation in order to be as transparent as possible about our decision making process.

ASTR is an organization that highly values intellectual integrity and social justice. Accordingly, the leadership agrees that we will not hold a conference that requires attendees to cross the picket line. Since negotiations between the union and hotel management are ongoing, I will share the steps we have taken and will continue to take in order to make informed decisions about how ASTR should adjust conference planning:

• We have paid close attention to the situation and Ewald staff has spoken to the hotel manager daily in order to get updates on who is involved in the negotiations and what progress, if any, has been made. The Program Chairs and VP for Conferences have been receiving regular updates, as will the EC going forward. Ewald is committed to preserving ASTR's integrity as an organization and protecting its financial interests.
• We have tried to communicate directly with the union (Unite Here!), both to express our support and to receive updates about the negotiations from the perspective of the union. We will redouble these efforts through multiple channels.
• Once we learned about the strike, we were able to negotiate an extension until November 2nd for those contracts we still had not signed, such as for hotel AV and program printing. We also identified a local printer in San Diego to use, which gives us more flexibility on program printing. These decisions were made to help minimize potential financial losses for the organization.
• We are actively exploring space availability at local San Diego academic institutions as alternative venues and researching accommodations in the surrounding area.
• We are actively researching other hotels in the city that can accommodate our conference, both with respect to programming and accommodations, at this late date.
• We are conducting a comprehensive assessment of the financial impact of various options, including cancelling our contract with the Westin, moving the conference to an alternative venue, etc. We are well aware that such an assessment needs to consider both the organizational and personal impact of our decisions.

It is impossible to know when the negotiations will conclude; therefore, on our call yesterday the EC decided to redouble all of these efforts for the next week and to hold a second emergency phone meeting next Thursday, November 1st if the strike is still active. At that point we will assess our research into alternative spaces and the organization’s finances to determine if we can viably move the conference to another venue at this late date. We will then announce a decision about whether or not we will hold the conference at another venue on Friday, November 2nd.

I am really grateful for your continuous support of ASTR and your faith in the leadership. I am so excited to learn that, as of today, we have record-high registration numbers and I sincerely hope that a resolution can be reached very soon to enable us to gather together and share our research. The Program Chairs and the VP for Conferences have been working tirelessly for an entire year to plan this year’s conference and I know that many of you have been a part of those efforts. At this moment, I implore you to be patient with us as we work over the next week to make an informed decision about our next steps. If the strike ends, we will immediately update you about that news. Otherwise, you will hear from me on November 2nd about whether we will be able to move the conference elsewhere.

Once again, please be patient and stay with us. We are all in this together!

Thank you all!

Peace and Love,

Daphne Lei
President, American Society for Theatre Research

Editors Anita Gonzalez (University of Michigan), Katerina Paramana (Brunel University), and Victoria Thoms (Coventry University) are pleased to announce the launch of the new book series Dance in Dialogue in collaboration with Bloomsbury Publishing. Dance in Dialogue critically explores the intersections between dance, performance, and disciplines such as critical theory, law, psychology, women’s studies, visual cultures, gender studies, history, cultural studies, social theory, language, geography, political economy, philosophy, history, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology. It fosters interdisciplinary approaches and conversation as a mode of knowledge production. The focus is on the spaces in between and the affordances and potentials of contemporary dance and performance, practice as research, screen dance, ballet studies, and popular and community dance when brought into dialogue with other disciplines. Dance in Dialogueis an initiative developed with the support of the Society for Dance Research (societyfordanceresearch.org).  The series will offer two distinct, but symbiotic publication formats:  a collection of short books emerging from curated conversations on topical issues in relation to the field, entitled In Conversation; and a collection of book-length monographs and/or edited collections, entitled Moving Forward, which aim to consolidate the knowledge emerging from In Conversation. The editors will be available to discuss possible projects with interested parties at the ASTR conference in San Diego on Saturday, 19 November 2018.  For further information and early expressions of interest please contact victoria.thoms@coventry.ac.uk.

Kiki Gounaridou (Smith College) published her essay, "Dominique Ziegler's Performance of Finance in Private Affairs," as well as her translation of Ziegler's play, Private Affairs (from the French into English), in the translation journal Metamorphoses 25.2 (Fall 2107).

Katie Johnson (Miami University of Ohio) received ATHE's 2018 Outstanding Article Award for "An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia's Emperor Jones," which was published in Theatre Journal.

Erika T. Lin (The Graduate Center, CUNY) won the 2018 Barbara D. Palmer Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Archival Research from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. The prize was given for her essay “Social Functions: Audience Participation, Efficacious Entertainment,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age, edited by Robert Henke, part of a six-volume set by series editors Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis.

Virginia Magnat (University of British Columbia) co-edited with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston (York University) the Thematic Section“Ethnography, Performance and Imaginationˮ for Anthropologica, as well as the Special Issue “The Transdisciplinary Travels of Ethnography” for Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (both in press). Dr. Magnat's text “Occitan Music Revitalization as Radical Cultural Activism: From Postcolonial Regionalism to Altermondialisation” is featured in Popular Music and The Postcolonial (Routledge 2018). Her new book The Performative Power of Vocality, based on interdisciplinary research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, is forthcoming in the Routledge Voice Studies Series.

Yana Meerzon (University of Ottawa), Katharina Pweny (Ghent University), and Gunther Martens (Ghent University) edited a special edition of Modern Dance (volume 61, No 3, 2018).  The edition is on Migration and Multilingualism, and features seven articles that discuss use of multilingualism in European theatre practices that focus on migration.  The journal can be found online: https://moderndrama.utpjournals.press/toc/md/61/3.

Rebecca Rovit (University of Kansas) has received a second Fulbright award. As a Fulbright Specialist in “Theatre and Genocide” (2018-2021) under the category of Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies, she will teach a course in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna in late Spring 2019. Course readings will include the bilingual book, Theater unter NS-Herrschaft. Theatre under Pressure (eds., Dalinger & Zangl, Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2018). Dr. Rovit is the book’s lead author with her chapter, “Assessing Theatre Under Duress in National Socialism: Tracking Theatre Repertoire in the Jewish Kulturbund and in the Camps.” She will also coordinate a symposium related to genocide and the arts while on site. 

Laurence Senelick (Tufts University) read papers at conferences in Nancy, Venice, and the IFTR meeting in Belgrade, and lectured at the Ohio Light Opera Festival.  Recent publications include “Eighteenth-century Russia” in The Commedia dell’Arte in Context, ed. Christopher Balme, “Orpheus in the Movie World: Offenbach on Film,” in The Composer on Screen.  Essays on Classical Music Biopics, ed. Peter Fryer, “Musical Theatre as a Paradigm of Translocation,” Global Theatre History, and eight articles for the Routledge Digital Theatre Encyclopedia.  He also published translations of plays by Feydeau, Labiche and Ferdinand Bruckner. He co-curated and performed in “The Poet Behind the Mask” for the Poets’ Theatre of Boston.

Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University) is celebrating the publication of his monograph The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era from University of Iowa Press. The book tells the history of the American Negro Theatre (1940-49), a landmark institution in the history of African American theatre. Shandell also charts the influence of this historic ensemble on the subsequent careers of several of the theatre's most notable members (Frederick O'Neal, Alice Childress, and Sidney Poitier), and its wider imprint on American culture in the 1950s-60s and beyond. For more information or to order: https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9781609385941/the-american-negro-theatre-and-the-long-civil-rights-era. Use promo code SHAN40 for 40% off the list price.

Shane Vogel’s (Indiana University, Bloomington) book, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze was published by the University of Chicago Press.  In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. 

S.E. Wilmer’s book, Performing Statelessness in Europe, was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

“This well informed and clearly written book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the relationship between theatre, migration and dispossession. The author introduces complex legislation in an informed and economic manner, deftly folding it into the theories of Foucault, Agamben and others, to reflect on detailed examples from theatre and performance practices in the UK, Ireland and other European states.”
—Dr. Alison Jeffers, Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of Manchester

The Museum of the City of New York is pleased to announce that over 400 scripts, scores, and sheet music by George M. Cohan (1878-1942) are now freely available online through the Museum’s Collections Portal.

Check out the announcement:
https://www.mcny.org/story/now-playing-george-m-cohan 

View the collection:
https://collections.mcny.org/Explore/Featured/George%20M.%20Cohan%20Collection/

This project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor. 

Odai Johnson (University of Washington) would like to announce that his new book, London in a Box, Being the Life and Times of David Douglass and the founding of the American Theatre, was released by University of Iowa press this past fall (2017). Additionally, his major study on classical theatre, Ruins: Classical Theatre and Broken Memory (University of Michigan, 2018) was many years in the making, will be released this summer. More information on Ruins can be found here: https://www.press.umich.edu/9751073/ruins. In Fall 2017, Odai had the honor of being awarded a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Utah.

Carol Martin (New York University) guest edited a special issue of TDR entitled "Reclaiming the Real." In July 2017, she gave a keynote, "The Real and Its Outliers" in Hong Kong at the first conference devoted to documentary theatre in Asia. The conference was sponsored by Pants Theatre Company, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, and Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. 

Yana Meerzon (University of Ottowa) would like to announce a special issue of the journal Recherches sémiotiques/ Semiotic Inquiry (Vol. 35 nos 2-3/ Vol. 36 nos 1-2) entitled Sémiotique du son au théâtre/Semiotics of Sound in theatre. This bilingual publication (English/French). It features 20 scholarly articles that collectively look into the methodologies of analyzing sound in contemporary performance. 

Kélina Gotman (King’s College London) is delighted to announce the publication – after more than a decade in the works – of two monographs, Essays on Theatre and Change: Towards a Poetics Of (Routledge) and Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Studies in Dance Theory, Oxford University Press); both deal in radically different ways with questions of discipline and disciplinarity, movement, and writing. Also at work on a co-edited volume, with Tony Fisher, Theatre, Performance, Foucault!, forthcoming from Manchester University Press, and a volume on performance, translation and everyday multilingualism. Articles on Foucault, Mallarmé and others have appeared recently in parallax, Textual Practice, SubStance andPerformance Research.

Kiki Gounaridou (Smith College) is continuing her translating project for five Swiss-French post-WWII plays; the first play in the project was Isabelle Sbrissa's Crossing the Desert, published in 2015. The translation of the second play, Private Affairs, by Dominique Ziegler, a play about neoliberal politics, corruption, and the stock market, written in 2009, was published in the translation journal Metamorphoses (2017), together with an introduction on "Dominique Ziegler's Performance of Finance in Private Affairs."

Judith Hamera (Princeton University)’s latest book, Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization, was published by Oxford University Press in November. Unfinished Business argues that Michael Jackson’s performances and coverage of his life, plays featuring Detroit, plans for the city’s postindustrial revitalization, and Detroit installations The Heidelberg Project and Mobile Homestead have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly about relationships between figurations of race and the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid 1980s and 2016.  Judith Hamera is Professor of Dance in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, with affiliations in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Urban Studies.

Kimberly Jannarone (UC Santa Cruz) is spending the academic year at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC, where she is the Archie K. Davis Fellow.  She published "Choreographing Freedom: Mass Performance in the Festivals of the French Revolution” in the Summer 2017 issue of TDR.  Her chapter, "Mass Performance, Outside and Inside the Democratic National Convention, August 1968" appeared in The Sixties, Center Stage (University of Michigan Press, 2017).  She wrote on Yale Repertory Theater’s production of Happy Days with Dianne Wiest for Theatre for a New Audience (2017).  She spoke on mass performance at the Response Performance Festival, Buffalo, NY (2017).

Ed Menta (Kalamazoo College) is pleased to announce two recent publications: 1) “Directing on the Thrust Stage: The Two-Room vs. One-Room Concept” in Acting Exercises for Non-Traditional Staging: Michael Chekhov Re-Imagined by Anjalee Deshpande Hutchinson. Routledge, 2017  2) “I Finally Saw The Greek Theatres in Theatre Topics 27.2 (Summer 2017). Menta also directed Fun Home, Book & Lyrics by Lisa Kron  K'83 & Music by Jean Tesori, one of the first college productions of the musical, which was invited to perform at the KCACTF Region III Festival in Indianapolis in January '18, and which received a Certificate of Merit for Direction.

Heather Nathans (Tufts University) was honored to have been appointed the Alice and Nathan Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies at Tufts University in November 2017. 

David Palmer (Massachusetts Maritime Academy; Emeritus) presents his anthology for Bloomsbury, Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O'Neill to the Twenty-First Century, was published on February 8. It contains chapters on 17 major American playwrights and a concluding overview of American theatre during the past 25 years.

Kirsten Pullen began as Professor and Head of the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She loves her new job.

Laurence Senelick (Tufts University) published Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press); a translation of Georges Feydeau, From Marriage to Divorce. Five One-act Farces of Marital Discord(Broadway Play Publishing); and the chapter "Sexuality and Gender," in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire, ed. Peter Marx (Bloomsbury).  He spoke at Davidson College on Evgeny Shvarts' The Dragon which was being performed there in his translation.  At the ASTR meeting in Atlanta he delivered a plenary presentation, "A Field Guide to Fairies. Popular imagery of gay male bodies 1870-1930."

Shannon Rose Riley, MFA, PhD, has recently been promoted to full professor in the Humanities Department at San José State University, which she also chairs. Her most recent book, Performing Race and Erasure: Cuba, Haiti, and US Culture, 1898-1940 was published as part of the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History Series in 2016.

Christian DuComb's book, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, was published by the University of Michigan Press in July. Haunted City Traces the deep roots of Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade, as well as the city’s history of blackface masking and other forms of racial impersonation. DuComb's paper "Blackface Photography and Performance Remains," an excerpt from the first chapter of Haunted City, won the inaugural ASTR-Cambridge University Press Prize in 2012. DuComb is assistant professor of theater at Colgate University.

Dr. Terry Russell has published the 2nd Edition of Drury Lane Drama Factory: Stephen Price, 'Yankee Impresario': Part 1, 1826. It uses the TRDL during the controversial reign of Stephen Price of the Park Theatre, NYC., to provide drama students with a sound understanding of the workings of Regency Theatre, and its relevance to Modern Repertory. Of particular note is the close connection between the UK & US stage developed by Price, including such transatlantic stars are Edmund Kean, Wm. Macready, James Wallack, Clara Fisher, and many others who populated theatres along the eastern seaboard and through to the Mississippi frontier. For further information and reviews email drurylanedramafactory@gmail.com

Katie Gough (University of Vermont) was promoted to Associate Professor of Theatre in May 2017.

Iris Smith Fischer has published "The role of semiotique in Francois Delsarte's aesthetics." Semiotica (September 2017): 20 pgs as well as a review of Expecting the Earth: Life / Culture / Biosemiotics by Wendy Wheeler. Critical Inquiry (Summer 2017).

C. David Frankel is the artistic director of The Tampa Repertory Theatre and recently received the Creative Loafing Best of the Bay Critics’ Choice Award as Best Director for his direction of The Realistic Joneses, Grounded, and The Other Place during the 2016-17 season. He will be directing Gnit, Will Eno’s take on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in January 2018. In addition to serving as the artistic director for TampaRep, Frankel continues as the Assistant Director of Theatre in the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of South Florida.

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta’s book, Traveler, there is no road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas was published by the University of Iowa Press in June 2017. Jackson-Schebetta also published her article, “Mexico, 1680: Decoloniality, the Anthropocene, and Performance History” in the Journal of American Theatre and Drama (vol 29, issue 2; June 2017). She began her term as Vice President/President Elect of the American Theatre and Drama Society in August.

Katherine Zien (McGill University) has published a monograph, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone (Rutgers University Press). More information is available here. Zien is also co-editing, with Dr. Colleen Kim Daniher, a special issue of Theatre Research in Canada on the topic "Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands." Please see details on the TRiC website here. Abstract submissions are due Nov. 1st.

Mark Cosdon hosted the seventh annual "Brilliance of the American Theatre" event at the Tony-honored Drama Book Shop in New York City. ASTR members Chrystyna Dail, Heather Nathans, and Peter Zazzali shared their new works in an annual event sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society. Joined by Allegheny students, Cosdon continues to teach a course in Italy on renaissance art, culture, and theatricality. Recently promoted to full professor, Cosdon will spend his sabbatical in Southern Italy researching Magna Graecia.

Erin Hurley’s first book, National Performance, has been published in French translation by Éditions Nota Bene as De l'Expo 67 à Céline Dion : essai sur la performance nationale. The original version is now also available in paperback from the University of Toronto Press. Additional recent publications include: two articles on circus, bodies and affect in Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017); another on performing as objects in contemporary Montreal theatre in Ireland and Québec: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on History, Culture and Society (Four Courts Press, 2016); and another piece on new and historical materialisms in women’s solo performance published in Performance Studies in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).

Christian DuComb's (Assistant Professor of Theater, Colgate University) new book, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press. Haunted City traces the deep roots of Philadelphia’s annual Mummers Parade and the city’s history of blackface masking and other forms of racial impersonation.

Kirsten Pullen begins as Professor and Head of the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 16 August 2017. She was previously Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.

Yana Meerzon edited “Michael Chekhov’s pedagogy today,” a special section of the journal Critical Stages. View here.

Katherine Zien (McGill University)'s book Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press September 1st, 2017. Learn more here.

Erika T. Lin (Associate Professor, Ph.D. Program in Theatre, The Graduate Center, CUNY) was recently elected to the Board of Trustees for the Shakespeare Association of America and will serve as the Chair of the Program Committee for their 2019 conference. She welcomes suggestions from ASTR members for building bridges between the two organizations.

C. David Frankel directed The Realistic Joneses by Will Eno and Grounded by George Brant for the Tampa Repertory Theatre. He is about to start rehearsals for the final show of the season, The Other Place by Sharr White. This summer he will direct the Excellence in Playwriting Award-winning play, The Censor, by David L. Williams, at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Annual Conference. He also serves as assistant director of theatre at the University of South Florida.

Lisa A. Freeman's (Professor and Head of English, U. of Illinois at Chicago) new book, Antitheatricality and the Body Public was just published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The work investigates the publics that are called into being, cultivated, and set in competition with one another as an integral part of antitheatrical controversies beginning with William Prynne's Star Chamber Trial in 1634 and ending with the Supreme Court decision in NEA v. Finley in 1998.

Jill Stevenson was recently promoted to full Professor at Marymount Manhattan College. She has also spent this past year co-chairing MMC's Institutional Strategic Planning process. She had two articles published recently: "Playing with Time's End: Cultivating Sincere Contrition in Medieval Last Judgment Performances, in The Routledge Companion to Early Drama and Performance, edited by Pamela King, and Passion Playing: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl on the Shaping Influence of Oberammergau, in The Oberammergau Passion Play: Essays on the 2010 Performance and the Centuries-Long Tradition, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. This second volume was dedicated to Professor Claire Sponsler.

Kimberly Jannarone won a National Humanities Center Fellowship in 2017-18 to complete her book, Mass Performance. In 2016, she directed and produced a multi-space, devised production of The Odyssey, and she gave a Leonardo Arts and Science Evening Rendezvous talk on the production. Her chapter "From Edge to Center and Back Again: Firmin Gémier and the Invention of People's Theater in France" appeared in Preservation, Radicalism, and the Avant-Garde Canon. She contributed to the Imaginary Theaters project. Her co-translation of Marion Aubert's Debâcles premiered at the Yale Cabaret (2017). She co-curated Yale's Hot Topics Lecture Series (2016). She gave talks at Yale, Tulane, UCSC, ASTR, PSi, and CDC.

Andrew Walker White, currently serving as Humanities faculty at Stratford University, will be lecturing selected senior faculty on traditional theatre and Christian ritual at Uppsala University, and will participate in a workshop there on "Religious Poetry and Performance in Byzantium." He adapted and assisted Dr. Walter Puchner on his forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, Greek Theatre between Antiquity and Independence. White's second book with Cambrige, From the Age of Theatre to the Age of Rhetoric, is currently in proposal phase. White continues to serve as theatre critic for Broadway World, Maryland Theatre Guide, and DC Metro Theatre Arts.

Dorothy Chansky was promoted to the rank of Professor at Texas Tech University, effective Fall, 2017. In July, 2017, she will become President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. Dorothy's 2015 book Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (University of Iowa Press), won a 2017 President's Book Award at Texas Tech.

Elizabeth Son, assistant professor in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University, was awarded the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship by the Women's Caucus for the Modern Languages (WCML). WCML is an allied organization of the Modern Language Association. Each year, the Florence Howe Award recognizes two outstanding essays by a feminist scholar, one from the field of English and one from the field of foreign languages. Son received the award (in the field of foreign languages) for her article: "Korean Trojan Women: Performing Wartime Sexual Violence, in the Fall 2016 issue of Asian Theatre Journal.

Laurence Senelick (Tufts University) has been inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He has just published translations of Sophocles' Oedipus the KingandFrom Marriage to Divorce, five one-act plays of Georges Feydeau (Broadway Play Publishers). This Fall will see the publication of Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press). He recently lectured at the Boston Athenaeum, Boston University and Stanford University, and will present papers at the ALA Conference in Boston and the ASTR meeting in Atlanta.

Daniel Sack (Assistant Professor in English and Commonwealth Honors College, UMass Amherst) published the edited collection Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage with Routledge in April 2017. The volume collects hypothetical performances written by close to 100 theorists and artists of the stage. Sack is also the founding editor of an accompanying web journal that will feature themed issues and user-submitted, peer-reviewed content. A first issue is forthcoming later this summer.