Bookshelf
This page offers an overview of the diverging publishing activities by S:PAM. We publish several book series and release our journal Documenta twice a year.
Documenta Journal
Documenta is a peer-reviewed journal for theatre and the performing arts. Prof. Dr. Christel Stalpaert and Prof. Dr. Bram Van Oostveldt are the editors-in-chief of Documenta.
The journal (ISSN 0771-8640) is an important forum for the study of theater in the Low Countries. It offers a platform for thorough, scholarly contributions on all aspects of theater, as well as essays and critical reflections. Although the main share of articles in Documenta is theater and performance, contributions relating to music, film and new media are also considered, insofar as they relate to the performing arts. The journal was founded in 1983 by Jozef De Vos at the former Ghent Documentation Center for Dramatic Arts. Since 2015 Documenta has been published by S:PAM at the Department of Theatre Studies at Ghent University. The editorial board is composed of theater scholars from various universities and colleges.
Since November 2023, Documenta is a fully open-access, online journal, making the research at S:PAM more widely accessible.
S:PAM-related Publication
S:PAM collaborates with a wide array of international publishers, such as Palgrave McMillan and Bloomsbury, for specific edited volumes
S:PAM reaches out to internationally renowned academic publishers for specific edited volumes and monographs that result from our collaborations, PhD and postdoctoral research projects, conferences and symposia. The latest S:PAM-related books include:
→ (Post)Socialist Dance. A Search for Hidden Legacies (2024)
→ The Sublime in the Visual Culture of the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (2023)
→ Theater. Een geschiedenis van de podiumkunsten in West-Europa tussen 1870-1950 (2022)
→ Choreographing Agonism. Politics, Strategies and Performances of the Left (2021)
AGent Series
With the Book Series AGENT: New Theses in Performance Research, the theatre departments of Ghent University and the University of Amsterdam united to encourage young researchers to publish their Master’s and PhD theses in corporation.
The Book Series AGENT aimed to provide a public forum for the dissemination of excellent research in the field of Theatre and Performance Studies. It encouraged outstanding young researchers to contribute their Master and PhD dissertations focusing on topics related to dance, theatre and performance in a global context, as well as music theatre, video art, installation, art, activist performances and digital theatre. These works were written in English or Dutch and are informed by philosophical approaches to aesthetics and ethics, by sociological and political concepts as well as postcolonial, queer and gender theories. AGENT was a co-operation between Belgium and The Netherlands. The editors of this series were prof. Dr. Katharina Pewny (Ghent University, until 2019) and Prof. Dr. Kati Röttger (University of Amsterdam) and Prof. Dr. Bram Van Oostveldt (Ghent University, from 2020 onwards). Authors include Lonneke van Heugten, Karen Schilders, Kristof Van Baarle, Suzanne Knip-Mooij, Jonas Rutgeerts, Elias D’hollander…
S:PAM Series
The S:PAM books focussed not only on theatre, but on all hybrid forms in the field of performance, dance, film and media, both in a contemporary and a historical context
The monographs and edited volumes in this series were usually the result of the international conferences and symposia organized by S:PAM. Edited by (former) S:PAM members, such as Christel Stalpaert, Frederik Le Roy, Evelien Jonckheere, and Jaak van Schoor among many others, the volumes assembled the many contributions to the themes that also informed our conferences. These include, but are not limited to, insanity as a theatrical practice, spectatorship, traces of film, and the work of Jan Lauwers and Needcompany.
→ S:PAM books are for sale via Skribis