"Rent at 30: Revival, Relevance, and Reckoning" A Call for Papers for the Performance Studies Area, NEPCA Annual Conference (NEPCA Annual Conference)
Virtual
Organization: Northeast Popular Culture Association
Event: NEPCA Annual Conference
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Jonathan Larson's Rent, the landmark musical that transformed Broadway and popular culture with its portrayal of bohemian life, love, loss, and the AIDS crisis in New York City's East Village. Winning four Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, inspiring a devoted fan culture of "Rentheads," and crossing over from Broadway into mainstream popular consciousness, Rent became one of the defining cultural works of the 1990s.
Three decades on, Rent invites us to look again. The show continues to be produced at remarkable rates, and its score remains genuinely beloved. At the same time, new generations of audiences and scholars have brought fresh perspectives to its representations of queerness, race, poverty, and the AIDS crisis. The show opened doors for queer visibility on the Broadway stage, for the rock musical as a form, and for audiences who saw themselves represented in mainstream theatre for the first time.
The Performance Studies Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) invites proposals for papers that engage with Rent from any angle. We welcome scholarship from a range of disciplinary perspectives including musicology, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, and media studies, among others. Accepted papers will be linked together for presentation at the October 15-17 virtual conference.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Rent and the AIDS crisis: Historical representation and contemporary resonance
- Race, identity, and casting in Rent then and now
- Gender, sexuality, and queer politics in the musical
- Rent and gentrification: The East Village as mythologized space
- The music of Rent: Genre, influence, and Jonathan Larson's legacy
- tick, tick... BOOM! and the reinvention of the Larson narrative
- Rent in revival: Regional, community, and high school productions
- Fan cultures, nostalgia, and generational reception
- The 2005 film adaptation and the challenges of screen translation
- Pedagogy and Rent in the classroom
- Poverty, privilege, and the politics of bohemia
Visit https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers and choose “single paper presentation” under Performance Studies to submit a 250-word abstract. Questions can be directed to the Area Chair, Rebecca Heimel: rebecca.heimel@cambridgecollege.edu
https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers
rebecca.heimel@cambridgecollege.edu
Rebecca Heimel