The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill: CFP
O’Neill Beyond the Horizon(s)
The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill
Suffolk University
Boston, Massachusetts
June 17 – 20, 2020
At the 100-year anniversary of Eugene O’Neill’s first full-length play—Beyond the Horizon (1920), which garnered his first Pulitzer Prize–and of the first play to break the color line on Broadway—The Emperor Jones (1920)—it seems fitting to look beyond the many horizons that have shaped O’Neill’s legacy for modern theatre.
This conference takes up the themes of beyondness, performative afterlives, and breaking with conventions: beyond canonical readings of O’Neill’s plays and stagings to consider the legacy of O’Neill’s dramaturgical innovations. We seek participants who wish to explore O’Neill’s own experimentation in his lifetime as well as experimental approaches to O’Neill in our own time. We invite scholars, historians, directors, playwrights, actors, and teachers to examine new ways of engaging O’Neill, thereby expanding our own scholarly and pedagogical horizons.
Boston’s geography is central to the conference, just as it was foundational to O’Neill’s development as a playwright. O’Neill was tethered not only to Boston/Cambridge (his brief early stint at Harvard; his later stint at the Shelton Hotel, now part of Boston University; and his eternal stint at Forest Hills Cemetery), but also to spaces beyond Boston/Cambridge. Facing out to the Atlantic horizon from the Boston harbor, Cape Cod and Provincetown beckon from the right and Marblehead from the left. Indeed, New England remained an inspiration for the setting of many of O’Neill’s plays, including and beyond Beyond the Horizon. Together, these spaces constitute important grids of O’Neill’s performative cartography, offering fresh perspectives of the horizons beyond.
Further details available here: CFP The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill (1)
Send proposals by email by September 1, 2019 to Katie Johnson at johnso33@miamioh.edu.