Congratulations to Our 2016 Award Recipients!

Co-Sponsored Event Grant

The Co-Sponsored Event grant exists to:

• Fulfill ASTR's purpose through collaboration with other organizations and institutions;
• Foster closer relationships with cognate organizations and/or projects; and
• Increase the visibility of the work of both ASTR and the award recipient within a wider professional context.

Recipients

Ann Folino White and Daniel Smith, Michigan State University
Great Lakes Theater Symposium
“Traveling through Time: Theatre History and Artistic Process”

Community Engagement Award

Recipient

New Native Theater, Twin Cities, MN

Inaugural José Esteban Muñoz Targeted Research Working Session

Convenors

Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University
Douglas Jones, Rutgers University
Shane Vogel, Indiana University
The Future in the Present: The Transtemporalities of Minoritarian Performance
Presented Saturday, November 5, 2016 at the ASTR Annual Conference

Grant for Teachers with Heavy Working Loads

The goal of the ASTR Grant for Researchers with Heavy Teaching Loads is to ensure that institutional affiliation does not hinder the contributions of individual faculty to debates that concern us all and that are central to ASTR's mission of cultivating scholarship on all aspects of theatre studies. In practical terms, the award provides: research support, which may take the form of funding to obtain or travel to research materials (i.e. archives, interview subjects) or contributing to funding of research assistance or course release, etc.

Recipient

Sharyn Emery, PhD, Indiana University Southeast
“Staging Activism”

The ASTR Collaborative Research Awards

The purpose is to foster the exchange of research across different academic and community contexts within the U.S. or between U.S. scholars/artists and those abroad. To foster long-term relationships benefiting faculty who work in different types of institutional environments. To foster the exchange of research in subject areas underrepresented in U.S. theatre scholarship, pedagogy, and performance practice. To enrich and diversify ASTR’s membership.

Recipients

Miriam Felton-Dansky, Bard College
Jacob Gallagher-Ross, University of Toronto
“Spectatorship in the Age of Surveillance” 

Helen Krich Chinoy Dissertation Fellowship

The Helen Krich Chinoy Dissertation Fellowships are intended to assist Ph.D. candidates with the expenses of travel to national and international collections to conduct research projects connected with their dissertations. These awards are available to Ph.D. candidates who have passed their qualifying exams within the last two years (or will have passed their qualifying exams by June of the current year) and have begun working on their dissertations. The project must be part of the dissertation research.

Recipients

Guanda Wu, University of Minnesota
“Nandan, Gender Plasticity, and the Dichotomization of ‘Artistic’ Femininity versus ‘Natural’ Masculinity from China’s Republican Era to the Early PRC (1912-1960s)”

Hesam Sharifian, Tufts University
“Americanizing Shakespeare in Print: Nineteenth-Century American Illustrated Editions of Shakespeare as Representations of National Identity”

Christiana Molldrem Harkulich
“Standing between the Reservation and the Nation: Indigenous Performance in North America after the End of the Indian Wars”

Research and Targeted Research Awards

The purpose of the ASTR Research Fellowships is to underwrite some of the research expenses of scholars undertaking projects significant to the field of theatre and/or performance studies. The fellowships can be used in conjunction with funding from other sources. 

Research Fellowship Recipients

Kate Bredeson, Bard College
“A Lifetime of Resistance: The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1947-2016”

Gwyneth Shanks, UCLA
“Performing the Museum: Displaying Race, Gender, and Nationalism”

The purpose of the ASTR Targeted Research Area Grants is intended to support specific projects by scholars working in areas important to ASTR's mission that are currently under-represented in its various activities.

Targeted Research Fellowship Recipients

Erin Alice Cowling, Hampton-Sydney College Tania de Miguel Magro, West Virginia University
“El Principe Inocente”

Carla della Gatta, University of Southern California
“The Erasure of Latinidad: The Festival Latino and Theatre History”

Bryan Schmidt, University of Minnesota
“Street Performance at South Africa’s National Arts Festival”

Brooks McNamara Publishing Subvention

This subvention supports the costs of securing rights to reproduce illustrations for publication, costs of acquiring illustrations, and/or the costs of reproducing illustrations in conjunction with a book under contract for publication. Electronic publications will also be considered.

Recipient

Laura Edmondson, Dartmouth College
Trauma, Inc.: Performing Violence in Central Africa (Indiana University Press)

Thomas Marshall Graduate Student Awards and David Keller Travel Awards

The purpose of the Thomas Marshall Graduate Student Awards is to encourage students to become active members of the Society by helping them to meet the expenses of attending the ASTR annual meeting.

Thomas Marshall Student Award Recipients

Kellen Hoxworth, Stanford University
“Transoceanic Blackface; or, the Silver Belt Jig”

Joseph D’Ambrosi, Indiana University
“Transforming the Gospels: McNally’s Corpus Christi and the Debunking of Evangelical Drama”

Sarah Blissett, University of Roehampton
“Biomimicry in Performance: trans/forming environments"

The purpose of the David Keller Travel Awards is to encourage untenured scholars with terminal degrees to become active members of the Society by helping them to meet the expenses of attending the ASTR annual meeting.

David Keller Travel Award Recipients

Jessica Del Vecchio, Drew University
“Coming Away from myself to be Myself: The Transfeminism of Half Straddle’s House of Dance”

Michelle Granshaw, University of Pittsburgh
“Tramping and the Cultural Reimagining of Work”

Dominika Laster, University of New Mexico
“Bodies that Trespass: Performances of Transmigration in Central-Eastern Europe”

Ariel Nereson, SUNY Buffalo
“Rehearsing Empathy: Embodiment, Mourning, and Lincoln’s Deathbed”

Selma Jeanne Cohen Award

This award provides a scholar to participate in a plenary or working session at the ASTR conference. This presentation must, in the spirit of Selma Jeanne Cohen, explore the intersections of theatre and dance/movement. The purpose of the award is to encourage scholars in dance and movement-based fields to become active members of ASTR by helping them to meet the travel and hotel expenses of attending and presenting at the ASTR annual meeting.

Recipient

Ariel Nereson, SUNY Buffalo
“Rehearsing Empathy: Embodiment, Mourning and Lincoln’s Deathbed”

Cambridge University Press Prize

The Cambridge University Press Prize is a newly constituted award funded by Cambridge University Press and administered by the American Society for Theatre Research.

Recipient

Sebastián Calderón Bentin, New York University
"The Politics of Dillusion: The Collapse of the Fujimori Regime in Peru"

Gerald Kahan Award

The American Society for Theatre Research offers an annual award for the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal. The essay can be on any subject in theater research, broadly construed. The Kahan Prize includes an acknowledgement of the editor’s contribution to scholarship.

Recipient

Jane Wessel, University of Delaware
“Possessing Parts and Owning Plays: Charles Macklin and the Prehistory of Dramatic Literary Property”

Oscar Brockett Award

The Oscar G. Brockett Essay Prize is jointly awarded by the American Society for Theatre Research and the Oscar G. Brockett Center for Theatre History and Criticism at the University of Texas-Austin. The prize recognizes the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or volume published by a scholarly press and relating to any subject in theatre research, broadly construed.

Recipient

Lisa Merrill, Hofstra University
“'Most Fitting Companions': Making Mixed-Race Bodies in Antebellum Public Spaces”

Sally Banes Publication Prize

This award is given in even-numbered year. This prize honors the publication (book or essay) that, in the opinion of the prize committee, best explores the intersections of theatre and dance/movement in the previous two calendar years.

Recipient

Anthea Kraut, UC Riverside
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Honorable Mention

Nadine George-Graves, ed.
Oxford Handbook Dance and Theater (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Errol Hill Award

The Errol Hill Award is given in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must have been published during the previous calendar year (2015 for the 2016 award), and deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.).

Recipient

Uri McMillan, UCLA
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015)

Honorable Mention

Adrienne Macki Braconi
Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015)

Barnard Hewitt Award

The Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History is awarded each year to the best book in "theatre history or cognate disciplines” published during the previous calendar year (2015). The University of Illinois initiated the Award many years ago to honor its founding department chair, Barnard Hewitt. 

Recipients

Uri McMillan, UCLA
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015)

Honorable Mention

Anthea Kraut, UC Riverside
Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Distinguished Scholar Award

The Distinguished Scholar Award is given each year to a scholar whose body of work has made a significant contribution to the field of theatre, dance, opera, and/or performance studies. The three immediately previous Distinguished Scholar Award winners will consider the candidates and select the recipient.

Recipient

Susan Bennett, University of Calgary