The Changing TDR Consortium: Princeton Exits, Yale Enters

As of this issue, Princeton University is no longer part of the TDR Consortium. Also as of this issue, Yale University joins the Consortium, now comprising Yale, Brown University, the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and NYU. One TDR issue a year is edited by a non-NYU Consortium participant.

Princeton's Consortium Editors, Jill Dolan and Stacy Wolf, edited two Consortium issues: Jewish American Performance (55:3, Fall 2011) and Performing Desire (58:4, Winter 2014). Both these issues powerfully fulfilled the promise of the Consortium to expand TDR's scope. TDR Associate Editor Mariellen Sandford joins me in thanking Jill and Stacy for their splendid work as Consortium Editors.

The person I worked with to bring Yale into the Consortium is Joseph Roach, noted performance historian and historiographer and author of The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), and It (2007). Currently the Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Roach has a connection with NYU, having chaired the Department of Performance Studies in 1993. Yale Consortium Coeditor Tavia Nyong'o—who focuses on the performative dimensions of blackness and is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz (2009)—was an NYU PS faculty member from 2003 to 2016, rising from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and Acting Chair. The third Yale Consortium Coeditor, Elise Morrison, earned her PhD in Brown's Theatre and Performance Studies Department and is the author of Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance (2016). Morrison leads Yale's Performance Studies Working Group. All three Yale Consortium Editors have published in TDR. I very much look forward to working with them.

Yale's membership in the TDR editorial Consortium is sponsored by the interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Theater Studies in Yale College (Daniel Harrison, Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory, Chair) and the graduate Performance Studies Working Group (Elise Morrison, Assistant Professor of Theater Studies, Convener). Additional faculty members of the Performance Studies Working Group include Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater; Tavia Nyong'o, Professor of Theater Studies and American Studies; Daphne Brooks, Professor of Theater Studies and African-American Studies; Marc Robinson, Professor of English in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of Dramaturgy in the Yale School of Drama; and Emily Coates, Director of the Dance Studies program and Assistant Professor Adjunct of Theater Studies and of Directing in the Yale School of Drama. Founded by Joseph Roach in 2003 under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Performance Studies Working Group meets weekly during the academic year to hear presentations by members and guests on topics representing the broad spectrum of performance research. Participating specialties include anthropology, art and architecture, drama, dance, gender and sexuality, history, music, race and ethnicity, religion, sociology, and urban studies, and they feature faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral students representing eleven departments in arts and sciences and four professional schools along with visitors to New Haven from around the world.