We Start Today
Call for Submissions
MusicTheatreDance: The Journal of the Music Theatre Dance Association
Issue 1 (2024): “We Start Today”
Editors: Shiraz Biggie, Hye Won Kim, Amy S. Osatinski, Kirsten Pullen, Arianne Johnson Quinn, and
Brian D. Valencia
We start today. We seek to bust down the doors of traditional scholarship in the fields of music, theatre, and dance and to scale the walls that divide us from each other and other disciplines. We seek to capture the urgency of an ever-expanding and -diversifying field.
We start today. We envision a publication that is global in its content and authorship. We envision a publication that is communal in its editorial structure. We envision a publication that is expansive in its coverage and its form. We envision a publication that is open in every way it can be. We envision a publication that does things differently.
We start today.
The Music Theatre Dance Association (MTDA) is pleased to announce a call for content for the first issue of its new flagship publication, MusicTheatreDance, intended for release in late 2024. This free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal will be a multi-disciplinary space for investigations at the intersections of music, theatre, and dance, as well as 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.
As such, 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, “We Start Today.” The editorial team invites you to submit work for the journal’s three sections–
Peer-Reviewed: longer-form peer-reviewed contributions (in the range of approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words for text-based submissions, though submissions of other media are encouraged);
In Process: less formal, refereed (but not peer-reviewed), shorter-form contributions, including and especially experiments in form and works-in-process; and
In Response: a medley of book and performance reviews, open letters, and other such responses to happenings in the field, which may take many forms.
Although 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.
Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis, and authors/creators should submit directly via this link. 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.
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, which are honored each year at the annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, edited for publication under the mentorship of a distinguished member of the field.
The editorial team welcomes your questions. You may send them directly to collaborating editor Brian Valencia at [email protected].