US Drama & Theatre Conference

Of Mutability and Malleability:

Re-imagining the Contours of US Theatre and Drama

10-13 June, 2026

University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

The Other Sophie Treadwell

This panel proposes to reconsider the work of Sophie Treadwell, beyond Machinal, her most famous play and a modernist, feminist, expressionist landmark, to consider Treadwell’s other works, with a particular focus on the significance of Mexico, the Southwest, the West, intercultural and interregional encounters, in her feminist, modernist, and avant-gardist work. With the purpose of broadening the scholarship on Sophie Treadwell, this panel invites papers that: explore Treadwell’s other plays, especially those with strong connections to the American West, Southwest, and Mexico, or consider Treadwell’s theatrical positioning and how it overlaps with regionalism as Treadwell pushed to have her experimental and political theatre produced on Broadway, crossing the boundary between commercial and avant-garde theatre, and papers that contextualize and analyze the recurring motifs of the frontier, intercultural exchange, and cross-regional identity in her work. This panel wishes to ask, for example,whether Treadwell presents the American West and Mexico as an idealized space or as a site of cultural conflict and “intercultural mutation.” Are the frontier and the US-Mexico border, historically spaces of expansionism and conflict, a site of crisis and transformation in her work?  How do these geographies influence her feminist dramaturgy and distinguish her from her contemporaries? Or how might we resituate her in American theatre history and canon by paying a more sustained attention to her other plays and her work’s connection to Mexico, the American West and Southwest?

Send an abstract (300w max) and a short bio to ac4595@columbia.edu by September 14, 2025.