theatre and performance studies

This seminar examines performance as a multilayered concept that is continually reshaped through travel and other mobilities. Performance, in this context, can be understood in its broadest sense as a dynamic practice through which identities, relationships, meanings, and experiences are negotiated and transformed. By bringing performance and mobilities into conversation as mutually illuminating frameworks, the seminar seeks to explore how their intersection creates new critical possibilities. 

This seminar seeks to read the concept of “kayfabe” alongside extant concepts in queer theory and criticism. The word “kayfabe” is quite young by linguists’ standards, and bears unclear etymology: coined by professional wrestling executives as an industry code word for manufactured narrative, the first printed reference to “kayfabe” occurs in 1988 wrestling newsletter, and its true linguistic origins remain obscure. Within professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to both “the tacit agreement between professional wrestlers and their fans to pretend that overtly staged wrestling events, stories, characters, etc. are genuine,” and “the playacting involved in maintaining kayfabe” (Merriam-Webster).

Special call for specific chapters on the subject of Vampires and Fashion, for a volume under contract at Peter Lang. 

For the last 100 years vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.

The Black Box: Opacity in Cinema and Media 

Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2027 Conference Panel CFP

Montreal, Quebec, March 17-20, 2027

Emma Gibb, emma.gibb@ubc.ca

Seeking three paper presentations for a pre-constituted panel proposal. 

Explore Shakespeare in a variety of media beyond traditional stage productions, including film, television, anime, manga, and recent novelizations of the plays. We have previously had papers on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.

As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes cultural, educational, and creative institutions, the field of Black theatre confronts a familiar set of questions in a newly technological register: Who creates knowledge, who benefits from it, who gets remembered, and whose labor remains obscured? Public conversations about AI often proceed as though these technologies have arrived without history, entering an empty landscape awaiting innovation. Yet Black theatre has long grappled with questions of representation, embodiment, archives, intellectual inheritance, collective memory, labor, and futurity.