This personal history of how the field of theatre studies in the United States has evolved during the author’s academic career begins with his entrance to doctoral studies at Cornell University in 1959 and continues to the present. Among topics covered are the national professional organizations and journals, and the changing interpretations of the scope and definition of the field itself.

During the past five years the cultural world in Germany has been shaken and divided by a series of controversies involving contemporary works of art charged with being anti-Semitic. Obviously, with the Holocaust continuing to occupy a major position in modern German consciousness and history, sensitivity to anti-Semitic expressions is particularly keen here. This sensitivity has been increased by a number of recent developments, including the growing visibility of far-right political groups, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) protesting Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and the official politicization of these tensions by a parliamentary ruling in 2015 restricting the activities of the BDS. The conflict between legitimate criticism of policies of the Israeli state and legitimate censorship of ethnically offensive material has recently become increasingly bitter in Germany. This article discusses the dynamics of three of the most significant recent examples: the conflict involving Germany’s most prestigious arts festival, the Kassell documenta in 2020; the withdrawal in 2022 of the European Drama Award, the continent’s largest award, from British dramatist Caryl Churchill; and the withdrawal from the Munich stage of the most recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, who has been widely heralded in Germany as the most significant contemporary dramatist.

Hazem's major international work in theatre was connected to his significant involvement with the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), the most important international organization of theatre scholars. In this organization, Hazem became one of the best-known and most respected younger members. He began regularly attending IFTR in 2005 and the following year he and I, along with Khalid Amine from Morocco, gathered the required fifty signatures from members of the organization to establish an ongoing working group dedicated to research in the theatre of the Arab/Islamic world. The Arabic Theatre Working Group was officially established by the organization in 2007 and Hazem served as co-convener of the group from that time onward. As such he was responsible for much of the organization and energy of the group, which became one of the most active in the organization, producing a variety of books and publications, regularly organizing major panels for the plenary sessions of the annual conventions, and establishing an online journal, Arab Stages, which appears twice a year and offers essays, interviews and translations from the Arab world and the Arab diaspora.

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

It is no secret, unhappily, that the study of theatre in the colleges and universities of this country is a discipline under siege, but the severity of the problems received strong confirmation in New York State this fall when two of the most distinguished and long-established (over a century in both cases) programs in the country were, with little warning, faced with draconian cuts or outright extinction. The fact that one, the state University of Albany, was the flagship school of the public system, and the other, Cornell University, was one of the state's most distinguished private institutions, suggests the scope and impact of these actions. At Albany, four other programs are being terminated along with theatre—Classics, Russian, Spanish, and French—while at Cornell the extent of the severe cuts imposed on the theatre program—almost a quarter of the total budget of the department (which also shelters dance and film)—are being suffered by no other program in the university. The prominence of these two schools in a state that has long claimed a central position in American theatre makes them particularly significant symbolically of a discipline in crisis, and this has impelled me to engage in serious and sometimes painful reflections on that discipline, the basis of the present essay.

This collaborative article looks at the establishment in 2006 of an IFTR/FIRT working group in Arabic theatre, and the significance of this in terms of breaking the twentieth-century, hegemonic hold of European and North American subjects in theatre research. We trace the development of the working group from preliminary conferences and gatherings outside IFTR to its set-up and organization within the Federation. Surveying our methodologies, key issues, research areas and future directions, we argue the significance of the group's work in creating a research forum for Arab theatre scholarship.

How appropriate it seemed when I found that Joe Roach's contribution to this series began with books in manuscript form he was currently reading, since this issue arrived just when I was reading his own It in manuscript (2007). It is vintage Roach, tracing the operations of “It” in accessories, clothing, hair, skin, flesh, and bone in eighteenth-century and modern public and theatrical performance. The work is a great read—erudite, witty, and packed full of fascinating historical tidbits and brilliantly illustrative quotations. If a cultural historian can have “It,” then that would surely be Roach.

Peter Zadek, now in his eighties, is among the most honoured and respected stage directors in Germany, a nation which during most of the past century has privileged stage directors above all other theatre artists. Zadek's central position is somewhat surprising in that he began his professional career in England and has in his repertoire, his public statements and his artistic approach sought to position himself outside the mainstream German tradition. This survey of his lengthy career seeks to illuminate this paradox, to show the nature and extent of Zadek's singularity and also to suggest what features in his approach have attracted such a devoted following within a culture he has never claimed as his own.

“What is the single most important thing we can do to bring theatre history into the new millennium?”

Clearly the attacks of 11 September 2001 served as a defining moment in the contemporary American political, social, or cultural imagination, and led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan and the far more controversial invasion of Iraq. Both wars were brief, the modest forces of these countries quickly capitulating to the overwhelming military superiority of Western forces, headed by the United States. On 1 May 2003, President George Bush announced victory and the end of the war in Iraq. Although the much more difficult and complex problems of occupation and pacification clearly will continue for some time, 1 May may be taken to have marked an end of a major phase in the crisis that was initiated on 9/11.

The boundaries of theatre as an academic discipline have never been particularly clear, and its relationship to other disciplines has been the focus of constant struggle and negotiation. This essay traces that negotiation, focusing upon its process in American universities. Competing with literature departments for the study of dramatic texts, American theatre departments drew their own new disciplinary model, based primarily on German Theaterwissenschaft, with emphasis upon the staging history and historical context of dramatic texts. More recently such emerging fields as performance studies and cultural studies have sought to transcend such traditional disciplinary boundaries. Despite some resistance from existing academic and publishing structures, the trend towards the breaking down of these traditional boundaries seems clear. Our academic culture seems headed towards a considerably more fluid organization of its materials of study than the traditional organization into fairly discrete disciplines could offer.