Call for Submissions
MusicTheatreDance: The Journal of the Music Theatre Dance Association
Issue 1 (2027) “Imagine it”
Editors: Stephanie Lim, Kathryn Edney, Hye Won Kim, Vicki Hoskins, Shiraz Biggie, and Adrienne Oehlers
Imagine it: Scholarship as performance. Performance as practice. Practice as inquiry. Inquiry as pedagogy.
Join us in imagining what MusicTheatreDance Journal can be. We call upon you, the scholars, educators, and practitioners in and across the performing arts, to help us envision how to break down the barriers in traditional scholarship and the communities in which we co-exist. We invite you to join us as we seek to open boundaries between fields of study in the arts, de-silo the material, and innovate the structure. We ask, how can this journal serve as a host to expand the edges of our fields and reach across the “in-betweens” to serve the varying needs of the wide range of the authorial voices in our communities? What form should scholarship take? What are the containers for scholarly rigor and thought and how can we expand and support all ideas?
The Music Theatre Dance Association (MTDA) is pleased to announce a call for content for the first full issue of its flagship publication, MusicTheatreDance, intended for release in 2027. This free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal will be a multi-disciplinary space for investigations at the intersections of music, theatre, dance, and other disciplines. Seeking to disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries, this multimodal journal will live online, playing host to both conventional scholarly essays and digital scholarship that takes other forms.
We imagine a journal where a conventional 7,000-word article sits alongside choreographic analysis, a video essay, a conversation between practitioners, an interactive digital piece, an artist's notebook, or a speculative work—each reviewed according to criteria appropriate to its form rather than asking for everything to fit into the same mold.
MusicTheatreDance seeks submissions across the full range of content and form, including traditional academic scholarship, artistic work, pedagogical scholarship, and other forms of research which may or may not address the theme of this first issue, “Imagine It.” Our journal is poised to be a forum for timely, engaged, and innovative scholarship that fosters conversation across the field. We welcome both traditional and experimental forms of scholarly engagement that will ultimately guide the shape and scope of our three editorial sections. The editorial team offers these general categories for your submissions in the hope that the originality in form and content widens our own conceptual ideas of what our journal can be.
As a starting place, your submissions can range from longer-form, more traditional, peer-reviewed article contributions (in the range of approximately 5,000-7,000 words) to non-text based submissions that engage with and build upon scholarship in the field. We are actively seeking less formal, shorter-form contributions, including and especially experiments in form and works-in-process. We are also soliciting a medley of traditional book and performance reviews, as well as less conventional and/or hybrid forms, such as interviews, dialogues, roundtables, letters to the field, commentaries, practice-as-research and pedagogical reflections, rehearsal or field documentation, annotated images, conference reports, and archive and media reviews.
Submissions for the Summer 2027 issue will be accepted by November 18, 2026. Submissions will be accepted thereafter on a rolling basis for future issues, and authors/creators should submit directly via this link. The editorial team will determine the placement of work into respective sections internally. If your work takes a multimedia or nontraditional form that is not easily uploadable there, please send a query, including a complete project description and explanation of its form, in lieu of the completed work itself. Conventional texts should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style. All submissions considered for the Peer-Reviewed section will be subject to anonymous evaluation.
The editors of our inaugural issue (0.5) of MusicTheatreDance from Summer 2025 directed us to envision a publication that is global in its content and authorship. We continue to envision a publication that is open in every way and that does things differently. While the editorial team welcomes submissions on all applicable topics, special consideration will be given to submissions aligned with the objectives of MTDA: those which de-center white cis-heteropatriarchy. In particular, the editors encourage submissions that foreground equitable and anti-racist practices and methodologies, and/or that elevate the work of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, women-identified, and global-majority artists and scholars.
MusicTheatreDance will be published once annually online by MTDA. In addition to the sections described above, it will feature the emerging scholars’ Bruce Kirle Memorial Debut Panel essays, honored each year at the annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), which will be edited for publication under the mentorship of a distinguished member of the field.
The editorial team welcomes your questions, which you may send directly to Facilitating Editor Stephanie Lim.