Capaciousness, Access, and Pedagogy

Capaciousness, Access, and Pedagogy: A Conversation with Karen Shimakawa Karen Shimakawa (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. Carla Neuss (CN): Thank you again for coming and considering these questions. You've had a long interaction with Theatre Journal over your career. Karen Shimakawa (KS): I think I got my first publication there while I was still in graduate school, which was really formative. One of my advisors was David Román, and he was instrumental in helping me start to even think about publication. I got a "revise and resubmit" and I thought it was a rejection. And so I took it to David and he said, "No, read it more carefully." And so I went back and it was one of the most positive experiences I've ever had with a journal. The editors were so kind and respectful, and took the time to really work with me and that was so important to me. Beyond that particular publication, itself, Theatre Journal really shaped how I approach academic publishing. It made me think about how it's so easy, as a reviewer when you're doing blind reviews, and especially if you have a lot of deadlines, to just be very curt, blunt, and at times unhelpfully forceful in your comments. And thinking about it from the recipient's side, when it might be one of their first journal submissions, a reader's report sets the tone for them in terms of how to be a professional, and models how to be collegial. And then in terms of the content of Theatre Journal, it has been so formative for me. It's how I learn about other people who are working on things that might be of interest to me. I read about playwrights I've never heard of before and [different] ways of doing work and writing about work. I think one of the things I appreciate about TJ is that, at least in my experience, it has been consistently a place where people with a lot of different interests in theatre studies cross paths; it's not really area specific or geographically specific in those sorts of ways. So I get to encounter people and works that I wouldn't just happen across in the library because through the Dewey Decimal System or something like that. And I really like the way it seems to be committed to publishing across the ranks; there are many people [published there] who are graduate [End Page E-103] students, who are early career scholars, but there's still robust representation of senior people in the field. And I feel like that's becoming increasingly rare but is very important. CN: Absolutely. How do you feel like the research part of our discourse is changing, based on where it's been and where you hope it goes? KS: I think I'm biased because I'm now in performance studies and so take this with a grain of salt: I think that the field of theatre studies, including what's represented in Theatre Journal, has become increasingly capacious. What counts as theatre—the kind of theatre, the style of theatre, the genres of performance—has really expanded, but also the voices of the people who are contributing to the journal. Who has something smart to say about performance is really quite diverse. And so I appreciate the way Theatre Journal and the field have really come to think [in more diverse ways]. I'm teaching an undergraduate performance class right now so I think about this a lot because students come into the class expecting to only study things that are primarily scripts and that are getting performed on a proscenium stage. And it's so much fun to blow their minds with everything else that is also part of performance. Having scholarship that is available to me in journals like Theatre Journal helps me in helping them expand their minds about theatre. I also think geographically [the field

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