CFP: Football and Performance
Editors: Eero Laine, Noe Montez, and Shannon Walsh

We are currently seeking chapter abstracts for an edited volume on football and performance. Theatre and performance studies allow us a unique view towards the ways that sports extend into civic space, politics, and daily life. How can the disciplines of theatre, dance, and performance studies serve as an analytic for sport, generally, and American football, in particular?

This project traces the theatricality of football across a variety of sectors ranging from the game itself to performance spaces, labor, fandom, and spectacle within and around the game. We are also interested in scholarship drawing from theatre, dance, and performance scholarship to explore how football engages with the complexities of race, gender, queerness, class, colonialism, globalism, and other political, social, and cultural discourses.

Strong proposals will engage with key theories, terms, and ideas from theatre and performance studies, advancing conversations in the field while offering dramaturgical insights into football as performance. We are interested in the intersections of theatre and performance with football across the range of its play: youth football, college football, professional football, and/or flag football. Contributors are encouraged to think structurally and comparatively across multiple teams, games, plays, or other particular case studies and examples.

Potential contributions might address:

• The dramatic structures of football gameplay, seasons, championships;

• The ways that rules are configured for theatricality / entertaining play (e.g., the tuck rule, changes to kickoff rules to increase returns, etc.;

• The aesthetics, language, and conventions of the game itself (e.g., beautiful plays, “color commentary,” endzone celebrations, etc.); 

• Football fashion, jewelry, hair, and style;

• The theatricality of box seating and celebrity;

• Halftime shows, sideline entertainments, and other performing arts related to the football event; 

• The stadium as stage (lighting, scenography, costuming, props, etc.);

• Stadiums and the space around them as places of performance and/or commerce—from campus geography to entertainment districts;

• The global circulation of football;

• Overlapping training between football and the performing arts;

• Characterizations of teams, fans, players, and their geographic regions;

• Shared technical and design equipment between football and theatre;

• Football in relation to live event tourism and mega-events;

• Audience and fan experience and engagement;

• Fantasy Football and sports betting and other forms of performance speculation.

Please send a title, 250-word abstract, and short bio to noe.montez@gmail.com, eero.email@gmail.com, shannonmlwalsh@gmail.com by September 1. Please note, if your contribution is accepted, the anticipated final word count for your chapter will be 6,000 to 7,500 words, including works cited and any footnotes. We will look to secure an advance contract with a press in the fall of 2026 and expect that initial drafts of chapters will be due by the first half of 2027.