The Story of Theater Historiography

The launch of the Web site “Theater Historiography” by the University of Michigan Press in 2011 reflects what we see as the changing role of the university press in the digital era. Following on the heels of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, the collection of essays that spawned it, the site was envisioned by Henry Bial of the University of Kansas, Scott Magelssen of Bowling Green State University, and the Press as “a gathering place for theater students and scholars to share ideas and tools.”Footnote ¹ Among the site's features are a blog, course syllabi, video clips, book reviews, and photos, and there are plans for further additions in the near future.

The twenty-plus contributors to the book were the first to participate, offering posts called “What Was I Thinking?”: blog entries that enlarge upon their essays in the book and describe the thinking behind the essays. The site quickly expanded from there to the broader disciplinary community, inviting anyone with commentary or other content related to the study or profession of theatre history to contribute. The most popular feature of the site so far has been the Faculty Club, which offers a range of syllabi, teaching prompts, and other fun stuff (e.g., Brian Herrera's theatre history crossword puzzle) that can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses. The site also offers meditations on graduate education, pedagogy/performance as activism, theatrical production, and theory and practice, among other topics, as well as video content ranging from Richard Schechner's talk on “The Conservative Avant-Garde” to a University of Kansas student production of A Midsummer Night's Dream that retained original Elizabethan pronunciation. The editors and the assistant editor, Oona Hatton, welcome your ideas and contributions.

Theater-historiography.org is one of a series of digital initiatives that the University of Michigan Press is currently exploring. In 2009 the Press became an organizational unit of the University of Michigan Library, a move reflecting a broader trend toward greater collaboration between academic libraries and presses in an era of change within scholarly publishing that has seen a steady decline in print along with a growing demand for electronic access and new forms of digital scholarship. The move not only brought the Press new colleagues from the Library's MPublishing division (librarians and Web mavens with skill sets that complement our own) but also inspired new ways of thinking about our role in scholarly communication and the dissemination of research. Like many presses, we offer most of our frontlist titles in print and digital formats and across various reading platforms. A number of these books come with digital enhancements (additional chapters, data sets, illustrations, video links) through our Web site. Select titles have been posted for commentary online before publication, and we are also working in nontraditional formats with scholarship that is born digital—that is, research designed to be seen and shared in nonbook form.

What Were We Thinking?

Innovations in digital publishing technologies and the rapid growth of online social networks suggest that publishers recognize the interconnectedness of the press and its authors, readers, reviewers—the communities within which we operate—and even our connections with other publishers.Footnote ² Michigan began to think differently about its major publishing fields and its relative role within them, in order to conceive of our community more broadly while we work to deepen our commitments to the disciplines in which we publish. One result of such effort has been to develop and host digital, interactive, disciplinary-based communities such as Theater-historiography.org in collaboration with the Library, our authors, and the broader community of scholars and students. Although these Web sites serve to call attention to Michigan's list of books, and though books remain our chief raison d'être, the goals for the Web site are not primarily commercial. The Press and its authors designed Theater-historiography.org as a “shill-free zone”Footnote ³ that encourages community and collaboration over marketing concerns, a philosophy further reflected in the site's links to publications by other presses. These links include book reviews and journal articles (e.g., Kim Solga's editorial for “The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy,” a special issue of Canadian Theatre Review, published by the University of Toronto Press). In addition, Michael O'Hara and Judith Sebesta have created a video blog about the creation of their digital textbook Explore Theatre, published by Pearson.Footnote ⁴

With the launch of Theater-historiography.org and plans for several new Web sites under way, the University of Michigan Press hopes to play a role in defining the scholarly communication pathways of the future. It's not surprising to find the innovative thinking and writing of scholars of theatre and performance at the forefront of these efforts.