Samuel Yates

In a few short weeks, my newest article, "Challenge Inaccessibility: A Worklist for the TDPS Job Market," will be available in "Critical University Studies and Performance," edited by Noe Montez and Ariel Nereson (Vanderbilt UP, 2026). This essay offers 20 goals (and concrete action items for each) to help run a more accessible and humane faculty search in academia. Although I have positioned this worklist for the volume's primary readers in the fields of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, its takeaways are intentionally portable across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences. I'll freely admit to feeling somewhat self-conscious about this piece, because in it I share disability microaggressions that I have faced in my own faculty searches. I know others have encountered far more severe and pronounced forms of inaccessibility or outright discrimination, and I am grateful to my colleagues across ranks and institutions who have shared experiences to help shape this action-oriented call to access. It's unlikely that you will be able to implement EVERY goal in any search–but my sincere hope is that you read this essay, share it with others in your departments, and USE it to build towards a more accessible, inclusive, equitable academia. If monetary access is an issue, please let me know, and I will be happy to share this worklist with you when it is published. Please request that your library purchase a copy of this volume! Pre-order your copy here: /9780826500359/critical-university-studies-and-performance/ _____ #theatre #disabilitystudies #dance #performancestudies #drama #access #accessibility #jobmarket #highered #academia #criticaluniversitystudies #criptheacademy #crip #hiringpractices #disabilityjustice #disabilityaccess

Our book TEACHING WRITING ACROSS THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES: A RESOURCE GUIDE is now available for pre-order online. As a Palgrave book, I know the hardcover is expensive, but please consider asking your libraries or departments to secure copies for faculty and graduate student use. Pre-orders are incredibly important to the overall health of the book's future circulation. With practical lesson plans, assignments, and assessment plans for a wide range of classes in TDPS, our Resource Guide is designed to help you teach writing in our discipline-specific classes. Perhaps your class is coded as a "writing" course in your university's gen ed or writing across the disciplines systems, or maybe you are just looking for tools to empower student communication? Some of us received thorough writing pedagogy training in graduate school, while others of us had mini crash courses in writing instruction or no explicit training in writing pedagogy at all! TEACHING WRITING ACROSS THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES: A RESOURCE GUIDE is designed to help you, whichever background or class circumstance describes your experience and expertise. This is a true "resource guide"; TEACHING WRITING ACROSS THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES contains over 20 chapters and an Assignment Appendix to supplement or refresh your writing pedagogy chops. Looking forward to the summer and the next academic year, if you are developing departmental programming or events that advance and support writing pedagogy in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies or, more broadly, Writing Across the Curriculum, I would be happy to speak with you. My thanks to @theatreistheory and our dynamic roster of contributors for sharing their expertise. Amazon Link (Pre-order Live): https://a.co/d/03NX8PpB Springer Link (Pre-order Forthcoming): /book/9783032246066

My next few weeks in London are fairly busy–here in town, and around the globe! If you’re interested in following any of the projects I’m working on, or learning more about disability aesthetics, artistry, and politics, I’m giving several talks and participating in panels this month. Information below: Feb. 14 – Roundtable, “Music Theatre Dance Studies: A Glance Across the Field,” MTDA Winter Symposium (Time: 15:15 EST, 20:15 GMT). This is an entirely online symposium with free registration, available at /mtda-winter-symposium-2026.html. Feb. 18 – “Calendars are Political Documents: Disability Access, Infrastructure, and the Long Work of Audience Belonging,” for the “Entry Points are Sexy” session for the Western Arts Alliance’s Presenting 101 Series. Session closed to registered participants. Feb. 19 – “Boy Falls from the Sky: Disability as Spectacle in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” Research Seminar, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London (Time: 18:00 GMT). Free, but registration required: /YatesCSSD. Feb. 24 – “Exhibiting Lives: Disability and the Economics of Wonder in Barnum!” Lunchtime Research Seminar, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London (13:00 GMT). [Contact for More Information.] I am really grateful to the Bennett-Muir Trust and the Victoria and Albert for providing time, space, and support to continue working on disability aesthetics in music theatre production. There’s a lot more to say about what I’ve been up to in London, but for now, I wanted to share a few places where we can have conversations and share thoughts in the coming days. __________ #disability #crippingbroadway #musicals #performancestudies #musictheatre

I’m thrilled to share that our special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre 19.2, “Disability in Musical Theatre," is now published. This issue was truly a labor of love with my brilliant co-editors, Caitlin Marshall and Lindsey R. Barr. Building from our desire to make space for further contact between the fields of music theatre studies, disability studies, performance studies, literary studies, musicology, and cultural studies, this special issue brings disability to the center of musical theatre studies as an aesthetic, historiographic, and practical force rather than a marginal concern. Across scholarly articles, artist interviews, a discipline-assessing roundtable, and notes from the field, the issue poses urgent questions: What happens when music theatre artists and scholars treat access not as accommodation but as composition? How does Deaf and disabled artistry reshape musical form itself? And what new critical and creative possibilities emerge when disability is understood as method, dramaturgical structure, and lived practice? SMT 19.2 "Disability in Music Theatre" insists that disability is not simply what musicals represent, but how they are built, heard, felt, staged, taught, and transmitted. I cannot express my sincere gratitude to Caitlin and Lindsey for their intellectual rigor, care, and collaborative generosity throughout this process; to Elizabeth Wollman and Jessica Sternfeld for their assistance, enthusiasm, and support; and, of course, to all of our contributors for reshaping how we think about musical theatre’s past, present, and future. I hope this issue sparks further scholarship, pedagogy, and making—and helps open the field toward more expansive, accessible, and imaginative possibilities. Our Introduction, "Making access: Crip aesthetics, historiography and practice on the musical stage," is available at /10.1386/smt_00194_2. You can access the entire issue at: /content/journals/smt/19/2. ________ #disability #musicals #musictheatre #broadway #theatre #disabilitystudies #accessibility #pedagogy

ASTR opened this year with "State of the Field" presentations and long table discussions on how we can meet this moment. I'm thinking particularly of Charlotte Canning's incisive call to mobilize and respond to the dissolution of shared faculty governance and free speech within the university. Working in higher education–especially in public universities–at this moment is challenging. The new issue of Theatre Topics contains "States/Stages of Emergency: A Work-in-Progress Resistance Toolkit," which comes from the ATDS States/Stages of Emergency symposium held in Summer 2024. While we don't offer concrete solutions, I am really proud of the collaboration and care that Donatella Galella, Chari Arespacochaga, Eric Mayer-García, Aaron C, Thomas, Pria Ruth Williams modeled as co-authors. This Note from the Field addresses contemporary attacks on DEI pedagogy, international and undocumented students, LGBTQ+ rights, academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure in the United States. The coauthors, principally theatre and performance studies educators-scholars-artists working in Republican-controlled states, offer a toolkit of strategies, including refusing to obey in advance, attending to the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law, and acting in solidarity. You can access it online at: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/974453/summary. If you do not have institutional access to Theatre Topics and would like a copy, please let me know. We need to work together, and I hope this note gives readers more tools to do so. ____ #theater #pedagogy #highered #sharedgovernance #resistance #carework #theatre #teaching

Amidst all that seeks to tear us down and derail conversations about disabled embodiment, access, and aesthetics as valuable assets to a just society, a real bright spot is getting to announce that I've been named the inaugural Musical Theatre Fellow by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the Bunnett-Muir Musical Theatre Archive Trust (BMT). My project, "Expanding Transnational Disability Aesthetics in Musical Theatre," will provide the necessary archival time and support to complete the final elements of my first book project, Cripping Broadway, which was significantly delayed during the pandemic. I will also use this fellowship to continue archival work on a second project, focusing on crip codemeshing and embodied languaging. I am incredibly grateful to the V&A and the BMT for sharing these resources, and I am looking forward to submitting a full manuscript soon. A hearty congratulations to all the awardees! More info here: /blog/news/va-and-bunnett-muir-musical-theatre-archive-trust-award-their-first-musical-theatre-fellows-and-grant-recipients #dramaturgy #crippingbroadway #disabilityaesthetics #musicals #musicaltheatre #theater #broadway #westend #disability #crip #criptheory #access #accessdramaturgy ___

Dramaturgy @gptcplays 2025. It's been a joy to continue returning to Great Plains each summer to help nurture new plays and support playwrights in their craft. In our landscape of increasingly fewer new play development spaces, GPTC offers an opportunity to play without the pressures of mounting a full-scale production on a summer stock clock. Applications for the 21st Annual New Play Festival at Great Plains Theatre Commons are now open, starting today, September 1, and will close on October 15. More details are available at gptcplays.com and on IG: @gptcplays ! Photo by Thomas Grady. #dramaturgy #newplays #newplaydevelopment #dramaturg #theatre #theater #art #gptc2025

Anthony Rapp + Adam Pascal. 11 August 2025. Broadway by the Boardwalk, Hudson River Park, NYC. #broadwaybytheboardwalk #nyc #rent #renthead #whatyouown #lightmycandle #broadway #musicals #musicaltheatre #theatre #freeart #artforall #democratizeart #publicart #nycforfree

Really pleased to share that my article “That musical politic: Musical theatre citations and satire in the Trump era,” available in Studies in Musical Theatre 18:2, received an honorable mention for the Methuen Prize for Best Essay on the Musical. I’m particumusicaltheatred that this essay is being cited alongside this year’s winner, my dear friend Donatella Galella, whose winning essay, “Democracy, ‘Democracy (reprise)’, and the Asian American Ambivalence of Soft Power,” in Theatre Journal 76:1, served as a cornerstone for my own thinking. My article argues that musicals aren’t a “safe space”—they’re political tools. In defiance of Trump’s demand on social media that theatre remain apolitical, artists have used musical theatre to do the opposite: to satirize, resist, and reimagine power. This article traces how Broadway performers, social media stars, and even graffiti street artists deploy show tunes and Broadway iconography as acts of protest—proving that musicals don’t just entertain, they intervene. At this moment, it may be challenging to envision how to adhere to institutional requests to “stay strictly to your subject” when theatre is deeply social and political. I think of Donatella and my articles as companion pieces for classroom discussion and thought. You can find Donatella’s article at /10.1353/tj.2024.a929510, and mine is available at /10.1386/smt_00160_1. If you do not have access to Studies in Musical Theatre, please do not hesitate to reach out. I’m happy to provide a PDF copy. Thanks again to the ISSM awards committee. I look forward to engaging with and learning from Faye’s article! ____ #musicals #musicaltheatre #theatre #theater #broadway #politics #activism #ISSM #scholarship #dramaturgy

This week I’m giving a talk on the legacy of Sondheim and Laurents’ ANYONE CAN WHISTLE in which I offer us new valuations for this little-produced so-called “flop” from 1964. Although WHISTLE predates the formal emergence of disability rights, or even disability studies as an academic field, the women in this musical are profoundly engaged in the very tensions that define disability justice movements. Sondheim and Laurents anticipate many of the insights of the social, cultural, and even phenomenological models of disability—showing how disability is not a defect in the individual, but something produced, managed, and manipulated by the needs of capitalism, by political expediency, and by fear of difference. Come join me, and the other dynamic artist-scholars in this free 3-day conference @librarycongress . You can register online at: /ticket/o/15159. #disability #disabilitystudies #criptheory #crip #crippingbroadway #musicaltheatre #loc #womeninmusicaltheatre #performancestudies #americanstudies #broadway #musicals #sondheim

Today’s our fifth anniversary of the day Roxie trotted into our lives. In some ways, I can’t quite recall NOT having her while, in others, it feels like our time together has been just a blink of an eye. I happened to see a post about Roxie on Petfinder at about 4 a.m. PST, since I was up to teach my 8a (EST) class online—it was the pandemic, after all. After a somewhat comical chain of events, we ended up with her at home that very night. This first photo is one Jarrod took of bunny and I sleeping on the couch, together, on that first evening—grateful that we found each other and comforted by our tenuous new love. The second photo of Jarrod and Roxie sharing balcony time is from our first week together. In the time since, Roxie has taught us a lot about unconditional love, care, patience, and joy. We don’t know everything that she endured before we adopted her, but we’ve certainly tried to ensure that she’s felt loved, safe, and cared for every day since she came into our lives. ____ #adoptionday #adoptdontshop❤️ #petadoption #rescue #rescuedogsofinstagram #ladyroxiebark #roxiebark #dogsofinstagram #gaydogdad #puppy #pupper #sleepypup

Really pleased to be returning to Great Plains Theatre Commons for my third year as a dramaturg for their 2025 New Play Festival. This year I’ll be working with Lori Goodman (playwright) and @addiebarnhart (director) on ESCAPE TO NEW YORK, @deejhills (playwright) and Mackenzie Zielke (director) on COME STRAIGHT HOME, and @chadkaydo (playwright) and Ron Zank (director) on #’s. I’ll also be the resident dramaturg supporting this year’s Four Directions Native Playwright Resident (TBA!). It feels like such a gift to return to a space where development is the shared goal, and everyone—director, playwright, dramaturg, actors, designers, and audiences—are collaborating and sharing space toward the common goal of helping the playwright advance their script. ___ #newplay #dramaturgy #dramaturg #theater #theatre #playwriting #gptc #gptc2025