On Editing, Paying it Forward, and Having Energy: A Conversation with Jean Graham-Jones, Former Editor

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• On Editing, Paying it Forward, and Having Energy: A Conversation with Jean Graham-Jones, Former Editor
• Jean Graham-Jones (bio) and Carla Neuss (bio)

This interview was conducted in June 2023 at Yale University through the support and generosity of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, UCLA, and ATHE; it has been edited for clarity and length.

Jean Graham-Jones (JGJ):

I was coeditor and then editor of Theatre Journal from 2004 through the end of 2007. I worked first with Harry Elam and then with David Saltz. It was a wonderful experience. I really love the apprenticeship model. Being coeditor and actively producing issues—it’s such a relief to have that under your belt by the time you assume the editorship. But that wasn’t my first engagement with Theatre Journal. I first published an article with Theatre Journal in 2001, edited by Susan Bennett. It was from my revised dissertation, which turned into a monographic study, and I was writing about censorship and Buenos Aires, Argentine theatre, and theatre artists during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983. I just submitted an article cold, as we all do. I sought to insert myself into a larger conversation. I’ll talk some more about that later on. But I really wanted to talk about Argentine theatre outside of a strictly Latin American theatre context, which is also a world I live in and love.

So that was my first experience publishing with Theatre Journal. Afterward, in 2014, I published another essay. Ric Knowles was the editor at that point, and that piece was about Argentine theatre during the latest socioeconomic crisis at the beginning of [End Page E-81] the twenty-first century. My students are always surprised: “You just submitted it like everybody else?” And I say, “Well, yeah, you’ve got to walk the talk.” I also published a performance review essay on the contemporary Buenos Aires theatre scene at the invitation of then-performance review editor Daniel Sack. That was a lot of fun. I think that was 2016. And my monographs have been reviewed in Theatre Journal as well. I’m currently on the editorial board, and I continue to serve as a peer reviewer. So I’m a big fan, and editing Theatre Journal remains one of the highlights of my entire academic career. It happened because after that first article was published, Janelle Reinelt, a former editor of Theatre Journal from a little bit before then sent me an email and said, “Jean, I think you should apply to be coeditor of Theatre Journal.” I said, “Wow, thank you. That’s a great idea. Someday I’ll do it.” And Janelle said, “No, do it now while you still have the energy.” So I have Janelle to thank for that connection.

Other things that I loved about my editing experience, other than getting to have these wonderful conversations with my colleagues, was getting to read an immense amount of work; you really do feel like you have your finger on the pulse of current scholarship and it’s truly energizing to be able to do that. I also felt that writing editorial comments required a different kind of writing: you’re speaking directly to your readers and writing on behalf of the journal. It was a remarkable and unusual exercise to write those editorial comments. With two general issues and two special issues a year, I spent—as editors do—a really long time thinking about what the focus of my special issues would be. Two, the first one and the last one, come directly out of my own work; I led off with a Latin American theatre special issue because that was my calling card and an opportunity to take a regional stand, and I ended with an issue on theatrical translation, which is also a space where I work and live.

The other two special issues I edited were not necessarily topics I was invested in yet, research-wise, though I subsequently became so I edited a special issue on hearing theatre and then another one on theorizing globalization through theatre. The hearing theatre issue came out of a conversation...