Scholar Spotlight:
Harry J. Elam, Jr.

On March 12, 2007, I had the opportunity to speak with Harry J. Elam, Jr., the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, as well as the Chair of the Stanford Drama Department and soon Senior Associate Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.

Elam is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (winner of the 2001 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Theater, American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Belgium, Israel, Poland, and Taiwan. He has also written essays published in several critical anthologies. Elam was most recently the editor of Theatre Journal and os on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. In 2006, Elam was the winner of the Betty Jean Jones Award for Outstanding Teaching from the American Theatre and Drama Society, and the winner of the Excellence in Editing Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education. He was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006.

At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards. In addition to his scholarly work and teaching, he has directed professionally for more than eighteen years. Most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleage, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast, and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson's plays, including Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter of which won eight Bay Area "Choice" Awards.
Elam received his AB from Harvard College in 1978 and his PhD in Dramatic Arts from the University of California-Berkeley in 1984.

This interview focused on Elam's work as an Editor and a scholar and his advice for ATHE Members working on their own publishing records while facing the demands of an academic life.

I began by asking him what he enjoyed most about editing Theatre Journal. He talked about the excitement of seeing the field as a whole given the healthy submission rate of 100-120 submissions per year and of getting a sense of what colleagues were interested in and how the field was growing. TJ also became increasingly international under his tenure as the journal began attracting more submissions from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Elam particularly enjoyed editing special issues around a central idea, especially the Black Performance issue dedicated to Marvin Simms. He also mentioned working with David Roman at the beginning and more recently with the current editor, Jean Graham Jones, as highlights of that experience.

The advice that Elam offered for scholars seeking publication: go to the first-time authors panel at the ATHE convention. In case you missed this year's panel in New Orleans, Professor Elam gave this summary:

The major point that we start that session with is critical: before you submit to a journal, read that journal. See what they publish. See how your article fits in with what they are publishing. The other advice I would give is to think about two central questions. How does this article illuminate the issue I'm talking about? And second, how does this article push the field forward? When you feel strongly about those questions, send it to TJ.

Elam also suggested asking a colleague to look at your work and give you feedback. Finally, Elam reminds first-time authors to look at the journal's guidelines for submission. It's important to follow each journal's conventions about endnotes, etc.

He was also happy to share advice for those seeking to publish book manuscripts. Some of the same principles apply here as well. "Many presses," Elam noted, "including the University of Michigan Press, now include on their website guidelines for submissions and proposals. I would look at those. Another thing that's not dissimilar to my advice about journals is to see what each press and series is doing and what they publish in the field. Some presses do more in our field than others. University of Michigan's series, Routledge has done a lot in our field, and more recently Duke has moved into thinking about performance, though it doesn't focus on dramatic texts. Cambridge has done American drama. Oxford has published work in the field. See if you can find a niche. Let's say you're writing on Russian theatre. Look at presses that handle not so much a theatre series, but are interested in Russian History. Or you're writing on Asian American Studies, there are series at Temple and elsewhere that focus on that. Find a publisher that you feel is and should be sensitive to your work. Or you're doing dance - a number of presses, Wesleyan, for example, have focused on dance. Find a publisher that's a fit. Find what they say on their website about what they're looking for in a proposal. A proposal, unlike a book manuscript, you can send out to more than one press. In the proposal you want to talk about a potential audience for your book. The market has changed for academic publishing, and you should have an idea about publisher's concerns about marketing. What you're doing in the proposal is staking a claim for your book - stating why it's necessary, arguing for why it fills a void in others' scholarship, why people should read it."

Elam was very generous with such practical advice for junior scholars.

Then we turned to his current research agenda. Elam is currently writing a book with his colleague and partner, Professor Michele Elam of Stanford's department of English. The latter Professor Elam has just finished a book on representations of mixed race in contemporary literature and popular media. Their joint project addresses the representation of mixed race on stage. Some of the questions the Elams are considering include, "What does it mean to put a mixed race body onstage? If the body is supposedly marked by racial ambiguity, what happens? What does the stage construct? What are the politics of that? We'll look at contemporary mixed race drama in the U.S.," explains Elam, "but we'll also look at post-aparteid ‘colored' drama in South Africa as a site of comparison. We'll see where there are similarities and differences in what people are advocating both in terms of the social politics and the ideas of identity and representation." Since the Public Theatre was in residence at Stanford this past year during the development of Henry David Hwang's new work, Yellow Face, I asked if their book might touch on the questions about mixed race that play raises. Apparently that text will feature prominently in the book's introduction.

Other projects on Harry Elam's mind:
"I've been toying with the idea of writing about Suzan Lori Parks and Lorraine Hansberry together, and the last idea I want to pursue comes from my trying to think about and theorize what it means to do ‘black performance studies.' The last issue I edited for TJ pushed me in that direction. How can race and thinking about race and performance, particularly blackness, inform what we think of as the field of performance studies?"

Clearly we all have a lot of exciting scholarship in store for us from the very busy Elam family.

This image of a busy family publishing and directing plays while teaching and the realization that Elam is finishing his rotation as chair of Drama only to work at higher levels within the University administration prompted me to ask for some details on his research and publication process and how he balances all this productivity with his many obligations to his students, colleagues, and family. First, I asked whether he likes to focus on one writing project at a time or if he prefers to work on several at once.

"My life is often about multi-tasking. But when something needs to be honed, it becomes the main focus. Right now, I'm not sure which of these projects that will be. When I start to feel good about something and get to the point where I really believe I have something to say, that's when I focus. I think lots of people do this, but I let outside deadlines help determine the focus. So, I have a conference in April where I'm going to talk about Parks and Hansberry. Or you have an essay due for an anthology or something like that. Deadlines help get you focused."

I asked about the recursive process of research and writing and how he manages those activities. He says he prefers keeping those activities relatively discrete. "The research is not just about researching the problem but also about getting a real grasp on what's happening theoretically or how I want to read critically or about a period if it's historical. When I get to writing I would rather just be doing that. I like going back and relying on details I've already gathered." Elam seems to have established a flexible rhythm of research and writing that alternates between tasks but allows for extended focus on each distinct stage of whichever project takes priority according to the deadlines at hand.

And his advice about balancing research with teaching, directing, and family?

"I love teaching. Sometimes one thing takes precedence over another. Sometimes family comes first. But I've been lucky or practical about relating classes to my work. Classes can be incredibly informative. I'm so grateful to a class that shaped my August Wilson book, for example. They were critical to shaping what I had to say. Class experience can really shape ideas. Another experience that can shape scholarship is directing. To me directing is critical interpretation for a non-academic audience. Some of the things you discover in that process can be so informative. In many ways teaching, research, and practice have been related and have informed one another. Administration can become all-consuming and other things get left behind. It's hard to balance that. But, I was talking to the former President of Stanford University, Gerhardt Caspar, and his position is that even in administration you should carve out at least 10% of your time for your own work. He also pointed out that to do a good job as an administrator like a President or a department Chair you have to understand that you're not only leading, you're serving."

It struck me that this theme of leadership combined with service runs throughout Elam's responses to each question I asked -- that Elam's editing, teaching, and scholarship also simultaneously lead and serve the field. I suspect in part it is this unity of purpose in each component of Elam's career that inspires his students and colleagues alike.

Speaking of inspiration, before leaving his office, I asked if Harry Elam had any more words of wisdom for the ATHE membership. "The only thing I want to say is that I wouldn't want to be doing any other job," he said. "You come into it because you have a love of theatre and performance. To be able not only to practice, but also to be able to think about what it means in society and write about it and teach it. Good stuff."