The UP News is a comprehensive program magazine that accompanies every production of the University Players. The magazine illuminates the production from aesthetic, historical, and artistic perspectives, provides insight behind the scenes, and informs its readers about the many activities associated with the University Players. It gives you the opportunity to gain essayistic and editorial experience and to launch a veritable publication. We welcome creative, analytic, essayistic, and review writing – and other genres that you might bring to the table. Check out the UP News blog on up-news.de.

If you enjoy writing outside obligatory term papers, this is a great opportunity to gain some editing and publishing experience. There are two rounds of feedback, one focusing on the content and your line of argument, the second purely on language. We’re proud to only have native speakers and lecturers from the language-practice department involved for the linguistic review.

Upcoming production: DEATH OF A SALESMAN

To Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman is “about the United States, a man, an economic situation, a family. It’s about a life.” To shed the light of tragedy on “the heart and the spirit of the average man” the playwright offers audiences Willy Loman, the titular salesman. Struggling to make ends meet, be a faithful husband to his wife Linda, and a role model to his sons Biff and Happy, Willy continues to hold on to the myth of the American dream, even as his mental state begins to unfurl.

Already a success when it premiered in 1949 and winning Miller a Tony and a Pulitzer, the play continues to be revived and remains a dramatic stronghold on syllabi in and outside of the US. Its themes of the destructive potential of founding myths, salesmanship, the struggle between father and son, and the economic struggle of the (lower) middle class seem to have maintained their relevance over the decades.

If you’re interested in writing for this issue, we will provide a copy of the play.

Suggested Topics

Essays

The play addresses a range of topics and can be viewed from numerous angles. While we are very open to your suggestions, we suggest these topics to write about:

• Salesmanship (then and now)
  • Historical background 
  • Gig economy, hustle culture 
  • Get-rich-quick-mentality among younger generations (Polymarket, crypto, OnlyFans, Manosphere)
  • Silicon Valley, „fake it till you make it“
  • Overlap between work and art
  • Affective experience of transaction + narratives of salesmanship – personality cults, charisma, authenticity, the salesman as product
  • curated (digital) personas thriving on staged rizz, talking no caps, as contemporary instantiations of the commodified self „post-Miller“

→ (the twisting of) the American Dream

• attractiveness and sell-ability of the promise as performance (see for example Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body, performative vs. constative speech)
• Texts we keep returning to (revivals, remakes, adaptations, classrooms)
  • Broadway revivals of DoaS (latest revival in 2026 directed by Joe Mantello)
  • (Compare with) other remakes of the moment (The Odyssey, East of Eden, Carrie, …)
• The genre of tragedy and “the average man”
  • Arthur Miller’s essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” 
• Stories about masculinity and how to navigate it (as a current trend), e.g. regarding
  • individual and collective repercussions of the male breadwinner in the heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family, linked to the paradox of male fidelity serving as both a rigid moral mandate and a calculated, systemic transgression
  • the psychological dimension of a subject-making based on a mythologized past, a present full of lies, and unrealistic fantasies of the future
• New ways of thinking about and discussing DoaS 
  • Helen Shaw’s NYT review framing Loman not as “an avatar for all us little guys” but “a specific, recognizable kind of danger” 

For your article, you’re welcome to draw on any sources, be they theoretical and academic, real-life events, other plays and literature or anything else. Yet, all pieces are tethered to the same ground, which is our production of DEATH OF A SALESMAN. Your piece will thus be strongest—and appear the least arbitrary—if you can tie your argument back to the play or the way it is staged. So please consider including references to or lines from the play to substantiate your essay and ground it in the context of its publication. 

Creative Writing

We welcome all sorts of creative writing and don’t feel restricted in terms of genre; we are interested in publishing poetry, prose, or dramatic pieces. You can take off from the issues addressed above or anything else in the play that resonates with you. While you might delve into one of the themes of the play—and spin it in any way required by your work—you can also take off from the work more closely and work with the characters, think about prequels, sequels, or alternative realities. These are just suggestions, shape your own space and page.

Dates

Bound both to the start of the semester as well as printing deadlines, the UP News has a rather tight schedule. These are the deadlines:

Submission: 22 November 2026
You will receive a review focusing on content and argument by 27 November 2026.

Revised version (content): 3 December 2026
You will receive a review focusing on language by 9 December 2026.

Final version: 12 December 2026 
You will receive the proofs (PDF for printing) for your approval at end of December or early January. You will need to respond within three days.

We are aware that the timing for this issue is rough. If you can hand in your work any sooner, this might give you more time to work on your piece between each review and the subsequent new version. We will do our best.

Length

Articles should be:

• 500–600 words (1 page) or
• 1,000–1,200 words (2 pages)

Poems or other short pieces of creative writing are also welcome if they are related to the play (these can be longer but should not exceed 1,800 words).

The UP News is an English-language magazine, but we also accept and publish German contributions.

Blog

There are no fixed deadlines for publications online. If you set out to write for the blog, you should aim at roughly 600 words.

Get in touch

Interested? If you consider publishing with us, it would be a good idea to reach out before submission to suss out whether your topic is already being covered, or if your own idea is a good fit for this issue. You will also receive the stylesheet which we will ask you to follow. This will also help us all to avoid having to choose between two essays on the same subject. The best way to reach us is by email: editors@up-news.de. We will get back to you ASAP but definitely within 48 hours.

If you cannot meet the deadlines this time but want to join the writers pool so as to be informed about the next opportunities, drop us a line as well.