Purpose of the award

This award is designed to recognise research excellence in English-language articles anywhere in the world in the broad field of theatre and performance studies.

Eligibility

• The Award is open to all financial members of ADSA.
• The publication period is January to December 2010.
• The winner is announced at the ADSA conference.
• The value of the prize is $400. 

Judges for the award in 2011 are Alison Richards (Monash University) and Denise Varney (University of Melbourne).

Nominations

Nominations are invited by authors, journal editors and interested scholars, specifying full reference for the work nominated and accompanied by a photocopy of the article or chapter.

Deadline: 26th March 2010. Please send a photocopy of the article or chapter, plus full reference for the work to:

Guidelines for judges

Marlis Thiersch

Dr Marie Louise Matilde (Marlis) Thiersch (1916-1992) was, with Philip Parsons, one of the co-founders in 1977 of the Australasian Drama Studies Association. She was born in Dusseldorf and lived in China before coming to Australia in 1939 to settle in Adelaide, where she gained her BA and MA, teaching in German Language and Literature at the University of New South Wales.

From 1974 until her retirement she taught in the Australian Theatre Studies Programme in the School of Drama, University of New South Wales, and was a committed promoter of Australian playwriting. From 1979 she was Director of the Australian branch of the international Theatre Institute where she worked selflessly to promote Australian theatre's international contacts. From 1972 she became a foundation member of the Australian Playwrights Conference and organised nine annual conferences. Her tireless energy and her enthusiasm for promoting Australian theatre and communicating between the academy and the profession is commemorated in this research award by the region's leading tertiary Theatre Studies association.

Past recipients of the award

2010

• Paul Dwyer and Lize-Mare Syron (University of Sydney) "Protocols of Engagement: 'Community Cultural Development' Encounters an Urban Aboriginal Experience" in About Performance No. 9: 169-191.
  

2009

• Gay McAuley (University of Sydney) "Not magic but work: Rehearsal and the Production of Meaning" in Theatre Research International, 33: 276-288.

2008

• Ian Maxwell (University of Sydney) "The Ritualization of Performance (Studies)" in Graeme St John (ed) Victor Turner and Cultural Performance, New York: Berghan Books, 2008.

2007

• Veronica Kelly (UQ)  "An Australian Idol of Modernist Consumerism: Minnie Tittel Brune and the Gallery Girls", Theatre Research International, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, pp. 17-36.

2006

• Jonathan Bollen (UNE / Flinders) "Remembering masculinities in the theatre of war", Australasian Drama Studies, no. 46, April 2005, pp.3-19.

2005

• Rachel Fensham (Monash University) "Mrs Patrick Campbell as 'hell cat': Reading the Surface Histories of a Female Body"  in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, vol. 30, no. 2, Winter 2003.

2004

• Helen Gilbert (University of Queensland) "Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre" published in Theatre Journal, "Theatre and Activism", vol. 55, no. 4,  December 2003. 679-698.

2003

• Ed Scheer (University of NSW) "What does an avatar want: Stelarc's e-motions" published in The Cyborg Experiments, Joanna Zylinska (ed.) (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2002) pp.81-100.

2002

• Peta Tait, (Theatre Studies, La Trobe) "Fleshed, Muscular Phenomenologies: across sexed and queer circus bodies" in Body Show/s, ed. Peta Tait, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 60-78.

2001

• Jacquline Lo (Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU) "Beyond Happy Hybridity: Performing Asian-Australian Identities"  in alter/asians: Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas, Annandale: Pluto Press, 2000, pp.152-68.

1999

• Veronica Kelly (Department of English, University of Queensland) '"Who's the Bigger Dill?": The Madhouse in Recent Australian Drama' in The Body in the Library, ed. Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). Series: Cross/Cultures - Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English.

1998

• Jane Goodall (University of Western Sydney) 'Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism'. The text can be accessed at Theatre Journal.

1997

• Robert Jordan (University of New South Wales) 'Visualising the Sydney Theatre, 1796'.