Theater Historiography

Questions about how theater history should be taught have in recent years provoked passionate discussions. Some scholars have argued that the emerging discipline of performance studies should replace theater history altogether. On the other side of the debate, traditional theater historians have sometimes rejected performance studies analyses as unsatisfactorily diffuse and less than rigorous. Showcasing the work of scholars conducting innovative and compelling research in theater history, Theater Historiography collects original essays that probe key methodological questions about interdisciplinarity, postcolonialism, the archive, and digital technology. The result is a volume that features a cohesiveness of theme and purpose while encompassing a range of approaches, historic periods, geographical areas, and performance genres. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the synergistic relationship between theater history and performance studies. Though the two fields have often seemed to be in conflict, the scholarship presented here draws freely on the methods and terminologies of both disciplines, showing that the critical intersection between theater history and performance studies is not just desirable, but inevitable.

Henry Bial is Assistant Professor of Theatre, University of New Mexico. He is editor of The Performance Studies Reader and co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook