Western States Drama Review

Western States Theatre Review or is it NW Drama Review we should decide.
The Review is a regional journal that publishes work based in theatre scholarship and theory, by or about regional theatre scholars and practitioners. The Review encourages submissions from theatre faculty and students (undergraduate or graduate).

Click to access Journal Archive This link is broken I am not sure there is an archive

Submission requirements:

Submissions (in MLA Format) sent electronically in .doc or .PDF formats to Deb Currier send mail and Emily Rollie send mail.
Submission Deadline for the upcoming issue is November 15. (Can we automate a ‘submit’ button that emails directly?)

SOME CONTEXT AND POSSIBLE TEXT FOR THE PAGE IF WE CONTIUE THIS

Scholarly Paper Competition
Proposal: that the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival sponsor an annual scholarly paper competition among students of theatre in institutions of higher learning throughout the regions of KCACTF.

Rationale: Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival serves as the national standard of excellence in theatre for students at all levels of higher education. Many of its most rewarding activities are competitive in nature, and a significant portion are performance oriented. In order to expand further student activity in the discipline of scholarship, a contest intended to encourage research and writing among graduates and undergraduates alike can be organized and executed on an annual basis.

Structure: Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival will invite all college and university students to submit their research manuscripts to the KCACTF Scholarly Paper Competition. Notification may be made through the KCACTF e-mail contacts with theatre departments and programs. The documents will be submitted electronically by the students to a central coordinator. The submission must also include a form that may be accessed via the KCACTF national website.

The manuscripts should not exceed twenty double-spaced, single sided pages, excluding endnotes and references.

All participants must be full-time students at the time of entry.

Graduate and undergraduate students from universities, colleges and community colleges are eligible.

The topics of the manuscripts must be directly related to theatre.

Evaluation: A team of evaluators consisting of six to eight theatre academicians throughout the regions of KCACTF will assess all of the submissions. Each submission will be forwarded to the evaluators electronically, lacking the name and identifying institution of the participant. The manuscripts will not be edited by the evaluators but ranked only. Their responses will be forwarded to the coordinator, and the winner selected based on the combined rankings.

Time line: Notification of the competition will be sent to departments and programs in the spring, following the national festival.

• Entries to the competition will be accepted from September 1 to January 1.
• Manuscripts will be forwarded to evaluators as they are submitted, but the period of deliberation will run from the beginning of January to the end of February.
• The winner will be announced March 1.

Award: An award for a national competition of $250 for first place and $100 for second place seems appropriate. An accompanying certificate from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival would be fitting.

Background: For several years the Northwest Drama Conference, in league with American College Theatre Festival-Region VII, has sponsored a NWDC Scholarly Paper Competition with a $100 award and certificate for the winners in the classifications of Undergraduate Student and Graduate Student. Additionally, on occasion the manuscript of a winner has been published the following year in the regional journal, Northwest Theatre Review. For example, this year’s Volume 15, 2009 issue contains, “A Voice for the Voiceless: Athol Fugard’s Effect as a White Dramatist in South Africa,” written by Tara McLauchlan, a Willamette University undergraduate and winner of the 2008 award.

Over the past few years interest in the competition has increased, but this year in particular activity has been extraordinary. There were fourteen submissions of undergraduate and graduate papers, many of an exceptionally high caliber. The entries ranged from University of Denver and Western Washington University to University of Oregon and Linfield College. Clearly, the scholarly productivity on the part of graduate and undergraduate theatre students has increased considerably.

Summary: Recognition and reward of theatre scholarship nationally seems a relatively efficient step for Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival to take by means of a Student Scholarly Paper Competition. Encouragement and support of student research and writing is a completely appropriate endeavor for KCACTF. Currently, the entire process can be managed and executed electronically. Once the template is in place, the competition can be repeated annually.