Contact: Franklin Crawford
Office: 607-255-9737
E-Mail: [email protected]
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Laurence Senelick, the Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University, is the winner of the 2000-01 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for his book The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (Routledge 2000). The $10,000 prize, administered by the Cornell University Department of English, is one of the most generous and distinguished in the American theater.
Senelick was selected by a committee of the chairs of and experts from the English departments of Cornell, Princeton and Yale universities.
"The Nathan Prize Committee found The Changing Room a most impressive book, massive in scope and remarkable for the originality of its insights," said Harry Shaw, the English department chair at Cornell who led the Nathan Award committee.
The committee's citation reads as follows:"The Changing Room is an encyclopedic study of the history of cross-dressing, onstage and off. ... Senelick's wide-ranging knowledge combines with lively and surprising firsthand reports of his own theater-going experience to make The Changing Room a compelling look at both the history of theater and the very specific theaters he has graced with his critical attentions ..."
Senelick, also director of graduate studies in drama at Tufts, is a well-known theater historian and prolific writer, with numerous books, edited works and articles to his credit. He has published particularly widely on topics involving Russian theater and representations of gender in the theater. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University where he serves as Honorary Curator of Russian Theatre. He has published more than a dozen books, including The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance, which won the 1997 Barnard Hewitt Award of the American Society for Theatre Research, and The Age and Stage of George L. Fox, which won the 1998 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association for the best book on theater.
Senelick also has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. He holds the St. George Medal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for service to Russian art and scholarship. His translations of plays have been widely published and performed, and he has directed and acted with such organizations as the Phoenix Theatre, the Loeb Drama Center, the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Baroque and The Proposition. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research and the editorial boards of The Journal of the History of Sexuality; Theatre Research International, Sexuality and Culture; and Nineteenth Century Theatre.
George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) graduated from Cornell in 1904 and went on to preside over the American theater scene during its formative development, approximately 1910 to 1950. As author and critic, Nathan's influence on American drama was wide-ranging and profound. He brought new sophistication to American dramatic criticism through a widely syndicated drama column published in Smart Set and American Mercury, which he founded with H.L. Mencken. For Nathan, the critic was the essential link between the ideal of drama and the vagaries of the living art form, and it was his hope to keep the ideal thriving under the terms of the trust he established. Designed to "stimulate intelligent play-going" the $10,000 prize has been awarded annually since 1958 to drama critics who exercised their powers to that end.
Past recipients of the Nathan Award have included Walter Kerr (1963) and Mel Gussow (1978) of The New York Times , Alisa Solomon (1998) of The Village Voice and Albert Williams (2000) of The Chicago Reader.
For more information, contact Harry Shaw, Cornell Department of English, at (607) 255-6801 or e-mail [email protected] .
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