How do plays and performance help us radically reimagine conventional understandings of time, and are all such revisions socially and politically progressive? This pre-organized panel invites papers exploring alternative dramaturgies of time and their political, social and affective stakes.

Drawing on scholarship that understands time as something constructed, manipulated, embodied, and contested, this panel is interested in plays and/or performances that challenge a linear or causal relationship between past, present, and future. We welcome papers that consider experiments in temporal form, particularly the use of alternative temporal structures to engage questions of memory, history, trauma, identity, and social change. Papers need not be explicitly comparative in their analysis. Possible theoretical approaches might include queer, feminist, or post-colonial temporalities, performance studies, memory studies, or dramaturgical approaches to history or speculative futures.

Please send a 250 word abstract and brief author biography to panel organizer, Victoria Scrimer (vscrimer@millikin.edu) by January 31, 2027. Participants should expect to present a conference length (~15 min) paper in-person as part of a 3-4 person panel at the Comparative Drama Conference July 7-9, 2027.