Call for Papers - 2025 Special Issues
Check out the following calls for papers for our 2025 issues on "Magic" (deadline Dec. 1, 2023) and "The Transnational Erotic" (deadline Feb. 1, 2025).
Special Issue for September 2025
“Magic”
Call for Papers
For this special issue on “Magic,” Theatre Journal invites submissions that consider magic as concept and practice, broadly construed, with a particular interest in how magic aligns with other terms like alchemy, transformation, trickery, prophecy, conjuring, and ceremony. Magical practices, phenomena, practitioners, and events are not often at the forefront of theatre, performance, and dance studies’ scholarship. Through categorization as, on the one hand, popular entertainment, and, on the other hand, a component of spiritual or ritual practice, magic has seemed beyond the scope of the concert and/or avant-garde traditions that have tended to dominate Eurocentric theatre history and theory. Yet, magic is also a common descriptor applied to the theatrical event by critics, spectators, and promoters alike, and a foundational assumption of what staged performance uniquely provides that can be traced to the oft-repeated claim that theatre requires us to suspend our disbelief. “Magic” is a historically contingent term nonetheless relevant to varying geographies and time periods; magic’s possible activation of imagination, transformation, and healing shares trans-geographic and cross-temporal cultural significance. Understanding whose performances are indexed as “magic,” and by whom, reveals continuities of magic’s availability as a term of imperialism alongside its ability to sustain individuals and communities.
Submissions might address magic and its technologies, affects, dramaturgies and sensations; magic’s connection to the performance of community roles like knowledge holding and ancestral memory; the use of “magic” to brand various performance practices and as a driver of performance’s economics; the myriad ways that magic is colonized, gendered, and racialized in performance history and theory; and critical approaches to various artists for whom magic is a core element of their practice. Overarching questions of the special issue include: How might we understand performance histories and theories via practices of magic considered commercial, vernacular, ritual, and/or experimental? How do performances of magic function as methods of organization, community-building, social formation, and political articulation? What alternatives to the limitations of empiricism can magic offer to theatre, performance, and dance studies as world-making endeavors?
This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal coeditor Ariel Nereson. We will consider both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for short provocations, video and/or photo essays, and other creative, multimedia material for our online platform (500-2,000 words). For information about submission, visit: https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines.
Article submissions (6,000-9,000 words) should reach us by December 1, 2024. If this deadline is not possible for you due to extenuating circumstances, please contact Ariel Nereson to inquire about a possible extension. She welcomes questions and inquiries at anereson@buffalo.edu.
The deadline for submissions to the online platform (500-2,000 words) is April 1, 2025. Online editor Tarryn Chun welcomes questions and inquiries regarding submissions to the online platform at tchun@nd.edu.
Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal.
Special Issue for December 2025
"The Transnational Erotic"
Call for Papers
This special issue, “The Transnational Erotic,” aims to challenge and refuse Western-centric understandings of sexuality, gender, and desire in the context of theatre, dance, and performance studies. Theatre Journal has cultivated a distinguished tradition of making theoretical and historiographical interventions vis-à-vis gender, sexuality, and performance; this issue aims to expand upon and complicate that tradition through an emphasis on diaspora, decolonization, and the Global South.
The phrase “transnational erotic” is meant to invoke and straddle burgeoning fields such as queer and transgender African studies, transnational feminism, and queer diasporic sexuality—that is, fields that share an investment in challenging Western epistemologies of gender and sexuality. We use the term transnational not to efface the significance of local and state formations of gendered and sexual subjectivities but rather to facilitate a “multinational and multilocational” approach that recognizes their entanglements with mobile capital, migrations, and border-crossing solidarities.[1] In a similar vein, the term “erotic,” which Sharon Patricia Holland succinctly defines in The Erotic Life of Racism as “the personal and political dimension of desire,” underscores the intimacies of sexuality, desire, and sociality.[2] It also pays homage to Audre Lorde’s canonical essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which refuses the racist and colonialist logics that insist upon the dissociation and containment of sexuality and desire. Lorde counters those logics with a conceptualization of a “lifeforce” that is diffuse, quotidian, and resistant as it seeps across “our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”[3] Her capacious theorization of the erotic, which has proved widely influential in diasporic queer sexuality studies, insists upon its potential for worldmaking and liberation.[4]
The fields of theatre, dance, and performance offer rich terrain for the exploration of the transnational erotic through their emphasis on (dis)embodiment, flesh, presence, difference, repetition, and multitemporality. Possible topics include (but are not by any means limited to):
mobile and migrant sexualities and feminisms; queer and transgender performance cultures in diasporic communities; colonialism and same-sex desire; the imperialism and/or glocalization of global human rights and NGO discourse; the erotics of global antiblackness; feminist, queer, and transgender historiographies in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America; tourism and desire; feminist, queer, and transgender activism and transnational solidarities. The journal welcomes explorations of the transnational erotic in a wide range of historical and geographical performance contexts as it seeks to center transnational, decolonial and postcolonial, diasporic, minoritarian, and Indigenous frameworks.
This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal editor Laura Edmondson. We will consider both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for short provocations, video and/or photo essays, and other creative, multimedia material for our online platform (500-2,000 words). For information about submission, visit: https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines
Article submissions (6,000-9,000 words) should reach us by February 1, 2025. If this deadline is not possible for you due to extenuating circumstances, please contact Laura Edmondson to inquire about a possible extension. She welcomes questions and inquiries at Laura.Edmondson@dartmouth.edu.
The deadline for submissions to the online platform (500-2,000 words) is June 1, 2025. Online editor Tarryn Chun welcomes questions and inquiries regarding submissions to the online platform at tchun@nd.edu.
Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal
[1] Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (University of Minnesota Press 1994), 3. See also Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sexuality." GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 663-679.
[2] Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 9.
[3] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 55.
[4] See Lyndon K. Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 4-11, for a moving exploration of Lorde’s essay through the lens of Black queer diaspora studies.
Submissions are always welcome for the journal’s general issues.
Submission FAQs
1. How often can I publish an essay in Theatre Journal?
An author may be published in the journal no more frequently than once every two years.
2. Can I have an essay published in Theatre Topics in the same year as Theatre Journal?
While the two journals are independent, it is best to space submissions to them so that essays by the same person are not appearing in the two journals at the same time.
3. If my essay is rejected by Theatre Journal when can I try to submit another essay to Theatre Journal?
An author must wait a year before submitting a subsequent essay to Theatre Journal.
4. My essay is about a single production. Will this affect its chances of being accepted?
Yes: Theatre Journal tends not to publish essays on a single play or production. Exceptions are occasionally made when essays explore a very broad and well-contextualized understanding of a moment or an aspect of performance or when the assessment of a single production is a springboard to a larger argument.
5. My essay is about a single play. It is a deep and thorough reading of that play. Would Theatre Journal be interested in that?
As with the answer to the question above, Theatre Journal tends not to publish essays on a single play unless they use that exploration to reinterpret the play or the author’s oeuvre, etc. Such an essay would need to demonstrate a very thorough knowledge of the ways in which the play has been read to that point.
6. My essay doesn’t deal very much with theatricality or performance. Will this be a problem?
Theatre Journal is interested in performance aspects first and foremost so it is very important that essays engage with theatricality.
7. My essay is very historically focused. Is it true that Theatre Journal privileges contemporary work?
Theatre Journal publishes the best essays relating to theatre and performance, regardless of era. Historical essays that are not accepted may deal with a specific moment in time without any indication of how that moment matters to a broad theatre readership.
8. Do I need to send in an abstract to get the editors’ approval before submitting an essay?
No, please do not submit an abstract: we prefer to read the full essay and make an assessment on that basis. If your essay is accepted, we will ask for an abstract then.
9. How many images can I expect to include in an accepted essay?
We can publish roughly five images per essay, but images are not essential. We urge authors to include only high quality images that contribute to the essay’s argument.
In some instances, depending on the topic, more images may be necessary and we deal with such matters on a case by case basis. The online platform can support images that are not able to be included in the print version. This platform can also support other forms of illustration/supporting material. Any images there are in color, while images in the print version are black and white.
As ever, it is the author’s responsibility to secure the high-quality images, the permissions, and to pay any cost for them.
10. How many images can I expect to include in an accepted performance review?
There is a maximum of two images per performance review, unless the review covers a festival.
As with essays, it may be possible for additional images to be uploaded to the online platform.
11. How often can I write a performance/book review?
An author can contribute one performance review and one book review per calendar year.
12. How often do the roles of Co-Editor, Editor, Online Editor and Book/Performance Review Editors turn over?
The Co-Editor has a two year term, followed by two years as Editor (four years total). The Online, Book and Performance Reviews Editors have three year terms. Calls for applications for these positions appear through ATHE approximately 6 months before the previous terms expire.
13. What is the function of the online platform?
The online platform extends the print journal and provides an exciting space for creative research that engages with multimedia and digital opportunities, such as video and photo essays, podcasts, documentaries, rehearsal footage, video interviews, etc. It is also a space where we can publish supplementary material that can’t be contained between the print covers (charts, extra illustrations, video clips, podcasts, etc). Through the online platform, the Editors can also communicate with readers about news from the team and from the field.
14. Can I propose to edit or co-edit a special issue of Theatre Journal?
While Theatre Journal has two special issues per year, the Co-Editor and Editor edit these. The journal doesn’t normally bring on guest editors. If you have a topic that you feel the journal should consider, please speak to one of the editors.
15. How can I have my say?
Please speak to one of the editors either at a conference or via email:
Laura Edmondson: Laura.Edmondson@dartmouth.edu.
Ariel Nereson: anereson@buffalo.edu