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Carol Sorgenfrei through her work as a playwright has written and theorized important fusion theatre works. As a scholar she has illuminated developments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japanese theatre with specialization in the work of Terayama Shuji. As a teacher and mentor she developed important textbook approaches and prototyped models that have effected the internationalization of theatre studies in higher education.
David Jortner is an associate professor of theatre arts and the graduate program director in the Department of Theatre at Baylor University. He is the co-editor of Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) and a contributing editor for The History of Japanese Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters, as well as the co-editor of the first "Founders of the Field" series for Asian Theatre Journal in fall 2011.
I first met Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (Fig. 1) at the Comparative Drama Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in 2001. I was a graduate student preparing to make my first trip to Japan to study contemporary theatre, and she kindly met with me over coffee and discussed my plans for research. She also indulged what now seem to me to be ridiculous notions of my own scholarly ambitions and carefully, and insightfully, asked questions and illustrated how both the paper I presented as well as my forthcoming dissertation could be improved. At the time I knew a bit about her research on Terayama; I was unfamiliar with her role as a teacher, playwright, and theorist. It was only later, after many subsequent meetings and intellectual collaborations that I realized the enormous scholarly debt that I (and the rest of the field) owe to Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei.
If David Goodman is the "founding father" of contemporary Japanese theatre research (Jortner 2013), then certainly Carol Sorgen- frei is the "founding mother." Her work on Terayama alone would be enough to merit inclusion in this series, but of course she has achieved much more in her more than thirty-year career. Sorgenfrei has been a successful playwright, scholar, translator, and teacher; her work has not only influenced how we think about modern Japanese theatre but also our conception of theatre history, ideas about the cultural use of theory,...