Theatre + Performance: Negotiating Culture and Politics
| Type of post: | Association news item |
| Sub-type: | No sub-type |
| Posted By: | Joanne Tompkins |
| Status: | Current |
| Date Posted: | Thu, 25 Sep 2025 |
[Apologies for Cross-posting]
Theatre + Performance: Negotiating Culture and Politics
A new book series sponsored by the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) welcomes proposals. This is an open call for dynamic discussions of theatre and its potential in an international world. This book series seeks to provoke discussions about and responses to significant matters affecting us all and how those are explored via performance. It seeks authors keen to foreground the ways in which different theatre and performance traditions, practices, or occurrences take shape and can help negotiate—if not reshape—our societies and cultures.
IFTR has throughout its history championed theatre and performance from performative and cultural contexts across the world. Earlier book series such as Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton’s Studies in International Performance and, subsequently, Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton’s Studies in Contemporary Performance InterActions have been successful in highlighting international topics and approaches in our disciplines.
Scope: At a time when the discipline is at risk, we are interested in proposals that demonstrate the inherent strengths of theatre and performance studies and what it can contribute to a vibrant social order. How can we redirect the precarity that too often is associated with our discipline towards vigour? How do we reflect on or defend the role and contribution of theatre and the difference it makes? We urge contributors to think broadly and boldly about how theatre and performance influence strong, diverse communities.
Format: Acknowledging the many ways theatre and performance cross borders and generate complementing or competing ideas and approaches, this series invites submissions that interpret their subject(s) from the viewpoints of multiple cultures or nations, and that articulate diverse voices. Further, given that we live in a multimedia world that enables different ways to disseminate research/knowledge, we welcome proposals that rethink the boundaries of the traditional book. This series seeks volumes that are academic in content, but we are also interested in the many forms or formats in which we can communicate about a topic.
Possible directions for proposals could include:
We invite proposals for single-authored and collaborative studies, in the form of monographs and edited collections, whether on historical and contemporary material, and from experienced scholars and early career researchers who are IFTR members. Manuscripts will typically be 70,000-90,000 words.
The series will be edited by Joanne Tompkins and Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr. It will be supported by an advisory board of leading international scholars who are well acquainted with the IFTR’s desire to support and develop diverse approaches and responses to our discipline. It will be published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. For more info visit www.bloomsbury.com/methuendrama.
To discuss a possible submission, please email Joanne Tompkins (J.tompkins@uq.edu.au) and/or Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr. (otserquina@up.edu.ph).
Theatre + Performance: Negotiating Culture and Politics
A new book series sponsored by the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) welcomes proposals. This is an open call for dynamic discussions of theatre and its potential in an international world. This book series seeks to provoke discussions about and responses to significant matters affecting us all and how those are explored via performance. It seeks authors keen to foreground the ways in which different theatre and performance traditions, practices, or occurrences take shape and can help negotiate—if not reshape—our societies and cultures.
IFTR has throughout its history championed theatre and performance from performative and cultural contexts across the world. Earlier book series such as Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton’s Studies in International Performance and, subsequently, Elaine Aston and Brian Singleton’s Studies in Contemporary Performance InterActions have been successful in highlighting international topics and approaches in our disciplines.
Scope: At a time when the discipline is at risk, we are interested in proposals that demonstrate the inherent strengths of theatre and performance studies and what it can contribute to a vibrant social order. How can we redirect the precarity that too often is associated with our discipline towards vigour? How do we reflect on or defend the role and contribution of theatre and the difference it makes? We urge contributors to think broadly and boldly about how theatre and performance influence strong, diverse communities.
Format: Acknowledging the many ways theatre and performance cross borders and generate complementing or competing ideas and approaches, this series invites submissions that interpret their subject(s) from the viewpoints of multiple cultures or nations, and that articulate diverse voices. Further, given that we live in a multimedia world that enables different ways to disseminate research/knowledge, we welcome proposals that rethink the boundaries of the traditional book. This series seeks volumes that are academic in content, but we are also interested in the many forms or formats in which we can communicate about a topic.
Possible directions for proposals could include:
- Selecting an artefact associated with the discipline and curating in book form many different cultural, historical and geographical interpretations of it
- Responding to particularly urgent matters affecting the field, from multiple perspectives
- Engagements between two or more IFTR working groups
- Engagements with IFTR conference themes, past and future
- Discussions of lesser-known performance traditions and how they might intersect with or diverge from performance elsewhere
- New international analyses or elucidations of traditional topics
- The effects of crossing geographical and generic borders on theatre and performance
- Emerging technologies and theatre practice/documentation
- International engagements with the post-human, the Anthropocene, the Chthulucene
- Exploring how the relationship between “aesthetic” theatre and applied theatre works in international performance
- The practices and implications of making theatre/performance in multicultural and/or multilingual contexts (with the possibility of some inclusion of multilingual resources as required)
We invite proposals for single-authored and collaborative studies, in the form of monographs and edited collections, whether on historical and contemporary material, and from experienced scholars and early career researchers who are IFTR members. Manuscripts will typically be 70,000-90,000 words.
The series will be edited by Joanne Tompkins and Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr. It will be supported by an advisory board of leading international scholars who are well acquainted with the IFTR’s desire to support and develop diverse approaches and responses to our discipline. It will be published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. For more info visit www.bloomsbury.com/methuendrama.
To discuss a possible submission, please email Joanne Tompkins (J.tompkins@uq.edu.au) and/or Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr. (otserquina@up.edu.ph).
