Meet Us in the Middle

June 25-28, 2025 Hosted by the College of Communication at DePaul University 

This year’s conference program will be announced in April.

Song, Stage and Screen 2025 will convene in Chicago, Illinois, at DePaul University’s College of Communication from June 25-28, 2025. Sometimes referred to as the “Second City” or “Heart of America,” Chicago is a vital (and often unsung) incubator for musical theater, dance, and opera productions. 

The location of this year’s conference invites us to contemplate the notion of “the middle,” and to suggest ways that “middles” inform the creation, circulation, consumption and study of musical theater. In recent years, scholars in musical theater studies and adjacent fields have demonstrated that “middlegrounds” can be a robust site for analysis. Stacy Wolf and Jake Johnson have directed our attention to the existence and importance of musical theater in the “middle” of the United States, while Derek Miller has encouraged study of “average” commercial productions and theater careers that are neither especially glorious nor terrible, but that ultimately drive the industry. Colleen Rua has addressed how musicals like West Side Story and In the Heights portray quotidian aspects of Latinx life, while Koritha Mitchell has argued that low or fair-to-middling standards enable and elevate white mediocrity. 

For the purpose of this year’s conference, “the middle” can refer to: 

• Geographic centrality: a hub or crossroads

• Symbolic centrality: primacy or concentration

• Measures of time, distance or process: a midpoint or median; en medias res

• Political centrism: neutrality, compromise, or nonpartisanship 

• Normalcy or mediocrity: middling quality; the middle of the pack

• Conventionality or provincialism: middlebrow tastes

• Between elite and inferior status: middle-class or mid-level success

Conference speakers must be current members of ISSM. There will be a modest conference fee for all attendees.  

2025 Conference Co-Chairs: Kelly Kessler, Dustyn Martincich, and Bryan M. Vandevender

2025 Conference Program Committee: Ryan Donovan (chair), Eric Glover, Kelly Kessler, Brandon LaReau, Ashley Pribyl, Guro von Germeten