Artistic research is a powerful, multimodal, and multidisciplinary mode of inquiry that opens new pathways for scholarship in theatre and performance studies. What began in the United Kingdom at the turn of the millennium as Practice-as-Research (PaR) has since evolved into a constellation of related-yet-subtly distinct practices that combine creative inquiry with traditional research methods with varying emphases on art creation and scholarly product. These methodologies challenge and expand the boundaries of how we understand research, scholarship, and performance, centering the creative process itself as a verdant site of knowledge production. These trans-modal research methods can be critically creative acts of resistance; furthering the still-radical feminist notion that the personal is political by insisting that somatic experience, emotional memory, and subjective perceptions are more than anecdotal, and central to the research process.

Among the key platforms that supported and advanced this work was PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, co-edited by William Lewis, Niki Tulk, Sarah Johnson, Amanda Rose Villareal, and Erin Kaplan, which published innovative scholarship that aimed to “invite new ways of thinking, making and writing about process” before concluding its publication run.[1] 2024 also marked the end of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, famously edited by Bonnie Marranca, which sought to foreground performance process and practice in a scholarly volume with a nearly fifty-year print publication history. Practice-based and somatic researchers such as Baz Kershaw, Petra Kuppers, Pil Hansen, Robin Nelson, Bruce Barton, Ben Spatz, Annette Arlander, Natalie Loveless and others continue to publish scholarship that prioritizes embodied experience as a vital component of innovative theatre and performance research. Erika Hughes and Boyd Branch have defined “embodied historiography” as “the practice of regarding performers as historical documents, using the act of performance to expose the subjective processing of memory and historical events through the live layering of multiple perspectives.”[2] Kim Marra has positioned PaR as a “queer mode of historiographical research” that disrupts linear historical narratives by exploring objects and their embodied practices, highlighting the significance of personal memory against public landscapes and traumatic histories.[3] Embodied explorations of history can be equally appropriate for dramaturgy and for pedagogy, a connection drawn by several authors included in the collection Physical Dramaturgy: Reflections from the Field, edited by Rachel Bowditch, Jeff Cassazza, and Annette Thornton.

This special section of Theatre History Studies explores the emergent field of embodied historiographies as it applies to theatre studies broadly construed. Process-oriented research can support embodied, creative, and collaborative epistemologies that locate bodies at the center of history. Performers, designers, dramaturgs, directors, technicians, and audience all contribute to the formation of a work, and by extension, to the knowledge it produces. How can embodied practice productively disrupt the mythical archetype of the solitary scholar in an ivory tower? How might embodied research resist dominant historical narratives? What is the potential for embodied historiographical methods to revise patriarchal, racist, ableist, or colonial histories? In what ways does an embodied approach to theatre history better allow the historiographer to speculate about the lived circumstances of historical subjects? Why are physical gesture, memory, or intuitive exploration vital to historical analysis? And, how do the collaborative and processual dimensions of artistic research allow us to recognize not only forgotten or erased historical subjects but also the often-unacknowledged collaborators who shape performance and its scholarship? This section also seeks to foreground contributions that interrogate how knowledge is generated through making, doing, and being. How do different modes of embodiment affect our understanding of history? How might rehearsals, workshops, or performances function as acts of historical record and analysis? In what ways do creative collaborators engage with time, memory, and evidence?

We invite traditional essays of 5,000-8,000 words (including notes), as well as innovative research products such as performance documentation, artist statements, case studies, public histories, active learning pedagogies, and work in other formats that explore the potential of embodied historiography as both method and praxis. We welcome contributions from scholar/artists working at the intersections of practice, theory, and history that reflect on topics such as:

• Practice-as-Research (PaR) and artistic research as historiographical methods;

• Embodiment and the archive, or, the body as a living archive;

• Intersections of personal narrative, affect, and political history;

• Collaborative scholarship and collective authorship in artistic research;

• Pedagogical applications of embodied historiography in the classroom or studio;

• The ethics of representing historical trauma through embodied means;

• Queer, feminist, decolonial, or otherwise intersectional approaches to embodied research;

• Empathy, emotion, and positionality in performance scholarship;

• Reflections on the legacy of publications like PARtake and PAJ;

• Creative-critical writing that challenges conventional academic formats.

All submissions should be guided by clear research questions and articulate a critical engagement with historiographical issues. Please send completed manuscripts and inquiries to thsembodied@gmail.com by 1 January 2026.

Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference and is published by the University of Alabama Press. Since 1981, Theatre History Studies has provided critical, analytical, and descriptive articles on all aspects of theatre history. The journal is devoted to disseminating the highest quality scholarly endeavors to promote understanding and discovery of world theatre history. Essays for the general section should be between 6,000-8,000 words and use endnotes rather than footnotes. Submissions in alternate formats will be considered on an individual basis. Illustrations are encouraged. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Alabama Press style sheet located on the MATC website (here).

Theatre History Studies accepts submissions for its general section on the full range of topics in theatre history on a rolling deadline. Please send manuscripts for the general section to: Jocelyn L. Buckner, Editor, at ths.editor@matc.us.

[1] William Lewis et al., “Editorial: A Final Reflection on Performance as Research,” PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research 6 (2), 2024.

[2] Boyd Branch & Erika Hughes, “Embodied Historiography: Rupture as the Performance of History,” Performance Research 19 (6), 2014, pp. 108-115, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2014.985118.

[3] Kim Marra, “Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance Historiography,” Theatre Journal 64(4), 2012, pp. 489-511.