Edited by two leading scholars of applied theatre, Drama and Theatre in Urban Contexts brings together a number of case studies that offer a framework for critical engagement with the central question of the volume: "How does theatre illuminate the urban and how is theatre illuminated by the urban?" Originally published in a special issue of Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance (vol. 16.2, May 2011), the foremost journal in the field, the contributions propose careful explorations of the aesthetics and politics of urban theatre, specifically understood in the context of this volume as "theatre made with or by those whose lives are marked by the urban landscape, its social limits and possibilities" (2). With chapters from a range of practitioners and/ or scholars from the US, UK, and Canada, the book illuminates current practices and debates in the diverse field of applied theatre, while contributing to the ongoing critical reflection on theatre and the politics of space/ place. The pieces are informed by the ideas at the core of contemporary critical urban studies, which construes the spatial not only as producing and reproducing the social, but also as invested with the liberating potential of reversing and re-envisioning social practices away from unjust configurations and hierarchies.Generally developed in non-theatrical settings, i.e., "in marginal spaces, suburbs, boulevards and schools, rather than in the cultural sectors of the domesticated drama and the bourgeois zones of contentment" (4), and conceived of as spaces of social inclusiveness, applied theatre practices position themselves in a productive tension vis-à-vis the common perception of theatres as places of "cultural privilege and class division" (Nicholson 59). Opening up the space of theatre to a range of unconventional settings and communities outside the mainstream theatre-
The present article sets out to analyze the emergence and institutionalization of American Studies as an academic discipline in Romania, with a focus on the specific contexts and factors that influenced this process, and the ways in which its practitioners defined, constructed, and focused their endeavors. Taking the University of Bucharest as a case study and adding insights from other Romanian universities, the paper seeks to give an account of: 1) the ways in which the several decades-long tradition of teaching American literature in the Communist period (sporadically until the 1960s, but ever more substantially in the following decades) prepared the ground for the institutionalization of American Studies programs; 2) the “conditions of possibility” that enabled this institutionalization after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, with an emphasis on the restructuring of the Romanian higher education system, on the one hand, and the specific renegotiations of the field of American Studies, on the other; 3) American Studies curriculum development and its impact on Romanian academia as an example of curricular reform in the spirit of interdisciplinarity; 4) the situated contributions that Romanian Americanists have made to international scholarship in American Studies by bringing new research agendas to the fore.
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