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The David Bradby Monograph Prize

This prize recognises outstanding achievement in scholarly research in the form of a published monograph for researchers at any stage of their career.

Prof. David Bradby

David Bradby
Nomination

PRIZES

2023

WINNER

Hannah Simpson

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2022.

Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance deftly thinks through the complex disability politics in contemporary stagings of Beckett, with a particular attentiveness to the practices and experiences of disabled theatre artists. Hannah Simpson claims the difficulty of Beckett’s engagement with and deployment of disabled bodies. Her writing is bold, clear, confident, and at times enjoyably polemical in style and tone. The book evidences deep and sustained research, drawing on text, performance analysis and original interviews throughout. The panel found this book to be original, intelligent and dynamic in its thinking and writing. We particularly appreciated the inclusion of interview transcripts, which gave voice to the disabled performers and artists studied in the book, and complemented and extended the analysis given in chapters. The book confidently meets the TaPRA principles of anti-exclusion, collaborative politics, and the inclusion of underrepresented voices in the study of theatre and performance. It is a well-deserved winner of the TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize.

SHORTLISTED

Siân Adiseshiah

Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre. London: Bloomsbury, 2022

Petra Kuppers

Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021

2022

WINNER

Arabella Stanger

Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession in Euro-American Theater Dance, Northwestern University Press, 2021

In a very strong field, the panel was particularly impressed with the ambition of Stanger’s contribution, and the potential for it to open up expansive conversations/debates across the disciplines TaPRA represents. The volume is rigorous in its theoretical framing and expansive in its engagement with archival materials. The work offers an important provocation to the field of performance studies broadly conceived, and it speaks with some passion to pressing political, ethical and critical debates in and beyond the field.

SHORTLISTED

Selina Busby

 Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2021

Rashna Darius Nicholson

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853–1893), Palgrave Macmillan, 2021

2021

WINNER

Pascale Aebischer

for Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

The judges agreed that Shakespeare, Spectatorship, and the Technologies of Performance offers an innovative perspective on the contemporary and historical ways that theatrical performances mediate, stratify, train, and create different forms of acting and spectatorship. The implications of the argument of this book extend far beyond the focus on Shakespeare and, indeed, theatre, demonstrating how dramaturgies of past and present intermingle, with old and new techne revealing and making possible complex productions of events and modes of spectatorship. This accomplished book is prescient, erudite, rigorous and beautifully written.

RUNNER-UP

 Lisa Woynarski

for Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

The judging panel commented that Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance, and Climate Change gathers together a diverse array of theatre and performance practices while skilfully offering an innovative set of concepts which practitioners and scholars can draw upon in creative and critical ways. It distinguishes itself through the provocative challenge it poses to itself and the field of theatre and performance in its final chapter: that is, considering the limits of theatrical representation and academic research with respect to indigenous ecodramaturgies, given the history of cultural, political, and environmental exploitation by the West. This is an important book that grapples cogently and persuasively with the most urgent of critical issues. 

SHORTLISTED

Maria Kapsali

Performer Training and Technology: Preparing Our Selves (Routledge, 2020)

Aylwyn Walsh

Prison Cultures: Performance, Resistance, Desire (Intellect, 2019)

2019

WINNER

Helen Nicolson, Nadine Holdsworth and Jane Milling

for The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre

The judges felt that Ecologies of Amateur Theatre offers a rigorous, engaging, overdue intervention into dominant presumptions – in theatre scholarship and professional theatre practice – about the ‘value’ of amateur theatre. This is a thoroughly researched, theoretically astute, critically vibrant and methodologically innovative approach to questions of cultural practice and theatre touching deeply on a range of issues of very broad interest, including craft, capital, feeling, temporality and much more. The monograph upends multiple presumptions and genuinely offers our field new and significant knowledge about a much-maligned sector. The authors research with feeling, which is refreshing and highly appropriative given the focus of the work: this is a valuably self-reflexive attempt to locate practices and objects of study without fixing either rigidly which offers an inspiring model to others. The engagement with those ‘studied’ is sensitive and respectful and the inclusion of journal entries brought the voices of the researchers, as well as the subjects of the research, into clear view.

SHORTLISTED

Jerri Daboo

for Staging British South Asian Culture: Bollywood and Bhangra in British Theatre (Routledge, 2017)

Anna Harpin

for Madness, Art and Society: Beyond Illness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Lynne Kendrick

for Theatre Aurality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

2018

WINNER

Kélina Gotman

For Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2018).

This substantial volume constructs a compelling picture of ‘choreomania’ – of mad, disorderly movement in public space – drawing on rigorous, extensive archival research and travelling through a wide range of disciplinary fields and methodologies, from psychiatry to sociology, from ethnography to journalism. An outstanding book that enriches dance studies and performance studies, it places ‘choreomania’ within historical, medical, political and social contexts, while also demonstrating how past events still resonate and have relevance today.

WINNER

Kélina Gotman

For Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 2018).

This substantial volume constructs a compelling picture of ‘choreomania’ – of mad, disorderly movement in public space – drawing on rigorous, extensive archival research and travelling through a wide range of disciplinary fields and methodologies, from psychiatry to sociology, from ethnography to journalism. An outstanding book that enriches dance studies and performance studies, it places ‘choreomania’ within historical, medical, political and social contexts, while also demonstrating how past events still resonate and have relevance today.

SHORTLISTED

Tony Fisher

for Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

2017

WINNER

Jim Davis

for Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

The judges felt that the book moved adroitly across concept, example (actor), and exemplification (illustration) to account for the reciprocity of interest, nomenclature, and patronage between Georgian-era performers and painters. Without a shred of pedantry readers are coached in the criteria by which to understand what it means for a painter to capture something “inherently theatrical” about a specific character yet also incorporate the accumulation of a performer’s reputation and the epitome of their unique technique.

SHORTLISTED

Lynette Goddard

for Contemporary Black British Playwrights (Palgrave, 2015)

Cathy Turner

for Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment (Palgrave, 2015)

2016

WINNER

Sally Mackey

For her work and leadership on the project Challenging Concepts of Liquid Place.

The judges felt that from inside, from outside, this project shows change towards place in action and declares its ambition for further work. It is the work of considered scholarship and practice: far reaching, versatile, inclusive and impactful both for the communities with which it worked and for the academic sector which TaPRA represents.

SHORTLISTED

David Barnett

A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press)

Fintan Walsh

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation (Palgrave)

RUNNER-UP

Peter Boenisch

Directing scenes and senses: the thinking of Regie (Manchester University Press)

2015

WINNER

Duška Radosavljevic

For Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (Palgrave)

SHORTLISTED

Sos Eltis

Acts of Desire: Women, and Sex on Stage 1800-1930.(Oxford University Press)

Graham Ley

Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance: Collected Essays. (University of Exeter Press)

Josephine Machon

Immersive Theatres. Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. (Palgrave)

Mary Noonan

Echo’s Voice : The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude. (Legenda Books)

Nicholas Ridout

Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love. (Michigan University Press)

2014

WINNER

Kate Dorney & Frances Gray

for the iPad app and book: Played in Britain: Modern British Theatre in 100 Plays

SHORTLISTED

Nicola Shaughnessy

For the ‘Imagining Autism project’

Robin Nelson

Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Palgrave)

Jen Harvie

Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave)

2013

WINNER

Jacky Bratton

for her book, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London

SHORTLISTED

Claire Cochrane

Twentieth Century British Theatre: Art, Industry and Empire (Cambridge University Press)

Oliver Double

Britain’s Had Talent: A History of Variety Theatre (Palgrave)

Patrice Pavis and Joel Anderson

Contemporary Mise en Scene: Staging Theatre Today (Routledge)

2012

WINNER

Aoife Monks

For her book, The Actor in Costume (Palgrave)

2011

WINNER

Heike Roms

For her project ‘It was Forty Years Ago Today: Locating the History of Performance Arts in Wales’

MAKE A

Nomination

Only current TaPRA members can submit nominations for our awards or elections. Each nomination requires a seconder, who must also be a current member.

TaPRA 2025 at Warwick

Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick, 27-29 August 2025

TaPRA 2025 at Warwick

Our 2024 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Warwick.

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