Overview

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics presents sixteen focused investigations that connect theatre and performance studies with public sphere theory. The organizing critical lens of publics and publicness allows for the chapters to speak to one another other across time periods and geographies, inviting readers to think about how performing in public shapes and circulates concepts of identity, notions of taste or belonging, markers of class, and possibilities for political agency. Each essay presents a theorized case study that grapples with fundamental questions of how individuals perform in public contexts. The essays, written by a cross-section of prominent and emerging theatre and performance scholars, contribute new discussions and understandings of how theatre and performance work, as well as how publics, publicity, and modes of publicness have been constructed and contested over the last three centuries and in multiple national contexts including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Argentina and Egypt.

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9781443837842

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Reviews

Author Information

Robert B. Shimko is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy at the University of Houston, where he heads the MA program in Theatre Studies as well as the BFA degree in Playwriting/Dramaturgy. Dr Shimko's scholarly writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre History Studies and Theatre Topics, as well as in the anthologies Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions and Querying Difference in Theatre History. He is the book review editor for Theatre History Studies. In 2008, he received the Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award from the Mid-America Theatre Conference and served as the MATC Theatre History Symposium Co-Chair from 2008–2010. Additionally, he is the Senior Dramaturg of the Houston Shakespeare Festival and has worked as a freelance dramaturg at several major US theatres.Sara Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. In 2007, she received the Gerald Kahan Award for the Best Essay in Theatre Studies by a Younger Scholar from the American Society of Theatre Research. She served as the MATC Theatre History Symposium Co-Chair from 2009–2011, and she is the co-editer of International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (Peter Lang, 2008). Dr Freeman's publications appear in Modern Drama, New Theatre Quarterly, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, as well as in Querying Difference in Theatre History and the forthcoming volumes Readings in Performance and Ecology and Performing the Maternal. She is a consulting editor for Theatre History Studies.

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