Theater & Community: Poetics, Politics, Performances (CDE 2023)

For a preliminary program please click here.

Keynote Speakers and Artists

Nassim Winnie Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at Karl Franzens University Graz, Austria, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Her expertise in the field of contemporary performance cultures includes opera and libretto studies, hip hop cultures, climate theater, indigenous theater, transnational performances, as well as adaptation studies – topics on which she has published widely. Her current research investigates enactments of the performative commons in contemporary North American drama and theater. This will also be the focus of her keynote lecture “Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction.”

Sabrina Mahfouz is an acclaimed British-Egyptian poet, playwright, performer and writer. Her play With a Little Bit of Luck has been performed across the UK, including at the National Theatre and the Roundhouse and was adapted for BBC 1Xtra radio, where it won the 2019 BBC Music & Radio Award for Best Drama. Sabrina is the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (Saqi Books), a Guardian Book of the Year. In her work she explores her mixed heritage and makes it the starting point for more expansive cultural observations. For instance, in her most recent anthologies Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen (Westbourne Press); Poems for a Green and Blue Planet (Hachette Children’s) and Sabrina Mahfouz, Plays: 1(Methuen Bloomsbury), she explores the entangled questions of race, religion, immigration, and class.

Mary Kathryn Nagle is a playwright, lawyer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Holding a J.D. from Tulane University, she works at the intersection of law and theater to secure the rights and sovereignty of Native nations. In her plays, she advocates on behalf of tribal sovereignty and self-determination as well as for the rights of Indigenous women.Nagle is a leading voice among indigenous theater artists. Her many plays–among them Katrina Stories (2008), Sliver of a Moon (2013), Sovereignty (2015), Manahatta (2018)–have been produced at prestigious venues across the United States, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, Arena Stage, Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian, Stanford Law School, and the Church Center of the United Nations. She will contribute to the conference with a reading from her most recent play On the Far End, which thematizes the role of women in Indigenous communities and their work as community activists. The play is scheduled to premiere at the Round House Theater in Washington D.C. in spring 2023. Nagle’s reading from the play will be followed by a moderated Q&A session. 

Tavia Nyong’o is William Lampson Professor of Performance Studies and Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. His research is situated at the intersection of performance, race, and queer studies and spans the field of 19th to 21st century Black performance cultures. He is the author of the seminal studies The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018). Nyong’o is the recipient of distinguished fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Ford Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the British Marshall Foundation and currently serves as editor-at-large for the journal Social Text. His current research interests include sexual dissidence and racial reckoning in contemporary expressive culture. The latter will be the subject of his keynote address to the conference, entitled “The Racial Reckoning in Art and Performance.”

Martin Middeke is Professor of English Literature at the University of Augsburg and has been aVisting Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, since 2008. He has published extensively in the fields of twentieth- and twenty-first century theatre and drama. His publications include a monograph on British playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff and he co-edited the Methuen Drama Guides to Contemporary Irish, British, American and South African Playwrights (2011–2015). Recent co-edited publications include Theatre, Drama, and Philosophy (2018); Of Precariousness: Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-Century British Drama and Theatre (De Gruyter, 2017); Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre: Exploring Feeling on Page and Stage(Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Critical Theatre Ecologies, JCDE 10.1 (2022). Current projects include a Handbook of Theatre Philosophyfor Cambridge University Press and an international website on Theatre Philosophy hosted by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (with David Kornhaber). He is a member of the research group Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (JCDE) and has been elected member of the ACADEMIA EUROPAEA since 2013. One of his current projects is titled “The Coming Community in Contemporary Anglophone Drama.”

PhD-Forum

As an organization dedicated to assist and support graduate students working in the area of contemporary theatre and drama in English, CDE annually hosts a graduate colloquium in the days immediately prior to the annual conferences.

During the forum, PhD-candidates are able to introduce and discuss their research projects as well as individual chapters from their dissertations with each other in an informal and relaxed atmosphere.

The forum is currently moderated by Martin Middeke (University of Augsburg) and Clare Wallace (Charles University).