Changing the Subject

Leading theater scholars discuss the major developments in their field over the past 50 years. The new field of theater studies changed rapidly in the post - World War II, post-Sputnik expansion of higher education, driven by the expressive urgencies of the baby boom and the ferment of the revolutionary 1960s. Internationally focused, communicatively multilingual, and culturally provocative, theater lent itself particularly well to the agendas of many constituencies, some of them violently opposed, in the arts and politics. The remarkable career of one theater scholar has mapped the issues, ideas, and methods of this emerging discipline during the most fertile period of its formation. Marvin Carlson's distinguished record of scholarship includes 15 books and more than 100 articles on the Western European and Arabic-speaking stages; Carlson has also been a prolific translator, editor, and reviewer and has taught and inspired generations of students, many of whom have become major scholars in their own right. ""Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies 1959-2009"" collects newly commissioned essays by eminent scholars to create a casebook on the changes in the field over the past fifty years. Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.