Newswise — New York University has awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater to University of Texas, Austin Professor Charlotte Canning for her On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and to NYU Professor Edward Ziter for his Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
The Callaway Prize is awarded biennially by NYU’s Department of English for the best book on drama or theater published during the previous two years by an American author. It carries a cash award of $9,000, which this year’s co-winners will share. These winning volumes are part of MacMillan’s “Studies in International Performance” book series. The books were selected from a large number of distinguished works on dramatic literature, performance theory, and theater history.
“The judges found the winning books compelling and timely, each excavating rich and powerfully consequential histories of performance, and raising important questions about the evolving geopolitical currents of nationally organized theatre work,” said Una Chaudhuri, professor of English and Drama at NYU, who administers the Callaway Prize competition.
Ziter, chair of the Drama Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has previously authored The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2003), among other works. Canning, a professor at the University of Texas’ Department of Theatre and Dance, has penned Feminist Theaters in the USA: Staging Women's Experience (Routledge, 1996) and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (University of Iowa Press, 2005) as well as Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (University of Iowa Press, 2010), co-edited with Tom Postlewait.
In addition, the selection committee awarded an Honorable Mention to Kate Elswit, a lecturer at the University of Bristol’s School of the Arts, for her 2014 work, Watching Weimar Dance (Oxford University Press).
The Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, first awarded in 1992, was established by Joe A. Callaway, an actor, drama lecturer, and supporter of theatrical causes. # # #
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