会议信息 | CFP：The 11th International Conference on Eugene O’Neill

The 11th International Conference 

on Eugene O’Neill

Longing and Belonging

Suffolk University Boston, Massachusetts 

July 6-9,2022

Deadline extended to September 15, 2021!

Dear Society Members:

Please review the CFP below and submit your proposals to Herman Farrell by September 15, 2021!

As we head into the 20s of the 21st century, we mark the centennials of key O’Neill plays that introduced his voice to a wider audience. Beyond the  Horizon premiered on Broadway in 1920 and ushered in a uniquely American tragic form. The Emperor Jones also opened on Broadway in 1920 and was a work that both experimented with emerging expressionist theatrical techniques and broke the color line on Broadway. The Hairy Ape, staged by the Province town Players in 1922, criticized capitalist structures and pointed out the fragility and fallibility of the American Dream.

Tapping into the zeitgeist of the early 1920s, a time when rapid changes in technology and industry, sudden shifts in workplace environments, and clashes between and among individuals based on differences of race, class, and gender swirled around the cultural and societal ether, O’Neill’s works reflected the longing and belonging that permeated the contemporary culture. A full century later, as we make our way out of the isolation and separation that pervaded the world-wide pandemic, a conference on longing and belonging seems to be not only fitting, but essential to the Eugene O’Neill Society’s participation in the current cultural conversation.

This conference calls for papers that interrogate and investigate notions of longing, the horizon beyond, the unattainable, the pipe dream, and/ or belonging, fitting in, feeling “at home.” And, in turn, we invite considerations of those who feel they can never belong: the alienated, the displaced, the misbegotten.

During this fertile and prolific period in O’Neill’s writing life, Exorcism  and “Anna Christie” also premiered and his willingness to experiment was taking off, so we seek participants who wish to explore O’Neill’s own experimentation in his lifetime as well as experimental approaches to O’Neill in our own time. We invite scholars, historians, directors, playwrights, actors, and teachers to examine new ways of engaging O’Neill, thereby expanding our own scholarly and pedagogical horizons.

Boston’s geography is central to the conference, just as it was foundational to O’Neill’s development as a playwright. O’Neill was tethered not only to Boston/ Cambridge (his brief early stint at Harvard; his later stay at the Shelton Hotel, now part of Boston University; and his eternal rest at Forest Hills Cemetery), but also to spaces beyond  Boston/ Cambridge, including  Marblehead to the north, and, of course, Provincetown to the southeast.

Send proposals by September 15, 2021 to Herman Farrell at：