We are pleased to announce our call for book proposals for the new Methuen Drama Agitations Series.

Please read below for more information and if interested, please contact one of the editors at the email below.

Theatre has always offered immediate responses to political, social, economic and cultural crisis events that are local, national and/or global in dimension, establishing itself as a prime medium of engagement.

Agitations aims to explore theatrical responses to crises as a source of progress and change, seeking to interrogate the manifold intersections between theatre and the contemporary while making a case for the urgency and topicality of theatre in the current moment. The series posits theatre as political engagement and intends to investigate its radical, change-provoking potential by pursuing an issue-oriented approach. While we highlight the contemporary, our interest in material is not limited to recent decades. Our series encourages discussions of the past (texts, performances, etc.) that highlight issues of today. 

Agitations’ scope will cross a number of spectrums, including contemporary politics, environmental concerns, issues of gender and sexuality, the complexities of race and race relations, and the challenges of globalization. The series will focus on text as much as performance, on theory as much as practice, all with the purpose to investigate the lively dialogues between theatre and contemporary lived experience. In short, the volumes in the series will providing a testament to the theatre’s engagement with the most pressing issues of contemporary society.

Published texts:

Theater of Lockdown by Barbara Fuchs (2021)

Theater in a Post-Truth Word: Texts, Politics and Performance Ed. William C. Boles (2022)

Forthcoming texts:

Performing Statecraft: The Postdiplomatic Theatre of Sovereigns, Citizens, and States Ed. James R. Ball III (Fall 2022)

Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance: Acts of Rebellion, Activism, and Solidarity Eds. DeRon S. Williams, Khalid Y. Long, and Martine Kei Green-Rogers (Spring 2023)

 Series Editors:

Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. She has published essays on contemporary British theatre, Brecht and Shakespearean adaptation. Her research focuses on political theatre, adaptation studies, Shakespeare and Victorian fiction. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama. 

William C. Boles is the Hugh F. and Jeannette G. McKean Chair of English at Rollins College, USA. He edited After In- Yer-Face: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution and authored The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall and Understanding David Henry Hwang. He is the director of the Comparative Drama Conference.

 Editorial Board:

• Lynnette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
• Anton Krueger (Rhodes University, South Africa)
• Marcus Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
• Sarah J. Townsend (Penn State University, USA)
• Denise Varney (University of Melbourne, Australia)

 Have a proposal that would fit this exciting new series? Submissions/inquiries can be sent to:

William C. Boles

Professor of English Rollins College, USA

wboles@Rollins.edu

AnjaHartl

Assistant Professor

University of Konstanz, Germany

Anja.hartl@uni-konstanz.de

Mark Dudgeon Publisher, Theatre Studies Bloomsbury Publishing

Mark.dudgeon@bloomsbury.com