Call for Papers - 2027 Special Issues
Check out the following calls for papers for our 2027 issues on "Plants" (deadline December 15, 2026) and TBD.
Theatre Journal Call for Papers: Plants
Special Issue for September 2027
Deadline: December 15, 2026
For this special issue on “Plants,” Theatre Journal invites submissions that consider plants – that is, botanical life – as context, method, theme, material, or actor/collaborator for performance histories and theories. Initially a project of philosophy, ecology, history, and botany, amongst other disciplines, the emerging interdisciplinary field of the “plant humanities” gathers researchers interested in re-considering plant life beyond the Enlightenment classification systems that have determined how plants have been understood and their complexities communicated. In other words, beyond what Banu Subramaniam calls a “monoculture of knowledge.”1 As Amit R. Baishya summarizes, key concerns of the plant humanities include “the agency of plants, the mutual coshaping of plant and human histories, the ‘intelligence’ of plants, the role of colonialism in a planetary botanical remaking, and the heterogenous aspects of
plant temporalities.”2 This special issue positions theatre, dance, and performance studies as significant interlocutors in this conversation.
Theatre, dance, and performance studies include their own rich traditions of ecocritical and new materialist thought as well as studies of performance with and among plants that connect clearly to the concerns of the plant humanities via the work of Una Chaudhuri, Petra Kuppers, Theresa May, Angenette Spalink, Naomi Stubbs, and others. Broadly, the concerns of the plant humanities form contact zones with theatre, dance, and performance studies theory across domains of posthumanism, disability, Indigeneity, and coloniality. Plant humanities’ theories of plant-thinking and the agency of plants – sometimes gathered under the term phytophenomenology – join what have, in our fields, been longstanding critiques of Cartesian dualism and affirmations of embodied knowledge, sensation, and lived experience. Indeed, plants may serve as a particularly mobile hinge for interdisciplinary analysis of performance that activates alternative conceptualizations of time, space, place, and sensation.
And yet, following the plant humanities’ lead, it is important not to re-instrumentalize vegetal and arboreal life for humans’ own scholarly interests; instead, the plant humanities encourages scholars to consider anti-Anthropocentric dimensions of plant life and their generation of the conditions of performance’s possibility. Indigenous Studies has long been a leading voice in how we might undo and remake our relations with the planet, including its waters and plants, and these critiques extend into the work of theatre, dance, and performance studies. Recent historical and artistic investigations of plant life view the vegetal world as in need of a repair that is
inseparable from other sites of global reparation, including Indigenous genocide and transatlantic enslavement. From Tiya Miles’s microhistory of the pecan tree, Black agriculture, and maternal care in her discussion of the seeds (pecans) carried in the enslaved girl Ashley’s sack in the 1850s to Lily Mengesha’s analysis of the birchbark megaphone at the center of Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 1990s performance practice Ayum-ee-aawach Oomamamowan: Speaking to Their Mother, ecological, racial, ethnic, and gender justice are entwined endeavors for our content and methods.3 What kinds of hierarchy (including those upheld in our disciplines) might be undone through taking seriously the “sensuous materiality” of plants?4
This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal Editor 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 15, 2026. 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, 2027. Online editor Sam Aros Mitchell welcomes questions and inquiries regarding submissions to the online platform at tjonline@athe.org.
Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal.
Notes:
1 Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism (University of
Washington Press, 2024), 206.
2 Amit R. Baishya, “Plant Theory,” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 33 (2025): 174-197, at 175.
3 See Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Random House: 2021) and Lilian Mengesha, Critical Dreaming: Feminist Performances Across the Indigenous Americas (New York University Press, 2025). For discussion of the intersection of Black studies and geological time, see Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). For critical Indigenous geographical approaches, see the work of Mishuana Goeman.
4 Edward S. Casey and Michael Marder, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (Columbia University
Press, 2024), xiii).