Sam O’Connell (Visual and Performing Arts) has had two sessions accepted for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s annual conference, which will be held in the summer of 2015 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
First, O’Connell will be chairing the Theatre History Focus Group Debut Panel as part of his work as associate chair for the group.
O’Connell also will present a paper in the multi-disciplinary panel titled “Disrupting Musical Theatre Historiography: Feminist, Queer, Regional, and Diasporic Explorations of Identity Construction through Musical Memories.” The paper will examine the ways in which book, lyrics, music, and mise en scene worked to create a diasporic re-imaging of “The Wizard of Oz” that offered its audiences different memories of an absent “home.”