Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease and Royona Mitra

for “Outing Archives/Archive Outings”, special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, 31:1–2 

Theron Schmidt

for Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (University of Chicago Press, 2019)

The judging panel agreed that Agency: A Partial History of Live Art is an elegant and beautifully presented mapping of important themes and topics in Live Art. The lens of agency provides an original perspective as well as providing a well-deserved tribute to the work of the Live Art Development Agency. The editorial strategy for the volume is very clearly articulated and the variety of voices and registers was extremely well curated and framed.  The work is very precisely edited with an excellent introduction to each sub-section. All the elements, including the images, are effectively integrated in a coherent totality.

Richard Gough

for Performance Research 24(3), On Reflection: Turning 100

Both the shortlisting panel and the final judging panel found this special issue of PR a monumental achievement. The judges commended the ambition and innovation of its concept: to commission an original essay on each of the themes chosen for each of 100 special issues of the journal. This framework produced a fascinating set of essays that were often formally innovative and conceptually rich. Excellence in editing is shown not only by the management of such an enormous project, but also in the layers of a plurality of inter-generational voices speaking to the edited work of the journal itself. The result is an encyclopaedic but creatively anarchic view of the field. Like the issue itself, theatre and performance studies is revealed to be interesting, odd, motile, dynamic, and plural. On Reflection: Turning 100 is less a guide to theatre and performance studies than a wander, and thus opens new possibilities for editorial practice.

Maria Delgado & Joanne Tompkins

for Contemporary Theatre Review: The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing: special edition. 25:1, February 2015.

The collection notes the relative invisibility of the labour of editing, and goes a long way to bring, in the words of the sub-title, the politics, processes and practices of editing into the light. The introduction effectively maps debates and issues, arguing for editing, in all its many forms, as one of the main ways in which academic disciplines mark where they are and chart a path to the future: as one of the sub-headings has it, it is about ‘The value of editing/ [as well as] the editing of value’, and as such it is a timely and welcome contribution to ongoing debates in the discipline about the value of editing to our research culture.