Joe A. Callaway Prize

Sponsored by the Department of English, the Joe A. Callaway prize is awarded every other year for the best book on drama or theatre published during the previous two years. The award honors the namesake, Joe A. Callaway, who dedicated more than 50 years to the theatre as an actor, director, lecturer, and critic. A panel of judges comprised of three professors in the fields of drama and theatre choose the winning book and grant the author a $9000 prize.

The 2020 Callaway Prize for the best book in Drama and Theatre has been awarded to A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theater Theory, 1850 to the Present, (Oxford University Press), edited by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The prize recognizes the book’s signal contribution to Drama and Theatre studies.   A Poetics of Modernity assembles and makes accessible, to readers of English, a multi-lingual archive vital to understanding the rich history of modern Indian theory.  This archive accompanied and emerged from more than a century and a half of transregional dramatic activity. The documents by playwrights, directors, and other theorists will interest scholars and practitioners alike and significantly deepen our understanding of many of modern India’s leading theatre-makers.  Dharwadker’s lucid and extensive introduction provides a crystalline outline of the volume’s methodological principles and historical aims.   Based on rigorous scholarship and wide reading, and featuring many new translations, this volume will make possible further theories of the range of theater practice across the Indian subcontinent.  The judges wish to celebrate and honor the enormous collaborative labor the volume represents, as well as the valuable work of its many contributors.  We welcome the book’s potential for expanding the study of modern performance theory beyond European and American sources. 

The panel of judges, chaired by NYU’s Professor Una Chaudhuri, included Professor Martin Harries of UC Irvine and Professor Eng-Beng Lim of Dartmouth.  Harries said of the winning title: “Anthologies have made important Indian plays widely available. Dharwadker’s A Poetics of Modernity will provide a crucial supplement to these resources: a “record,” in the editor’s words, ‘of Indian thinking about theatre on the part of those who have practiced it with distinction.’ This heterogeneous record, drawn from books, articles, letters, pamphlets, and other sources, in several languages, will enrich and de-provincialize scholarship and teaching – and, it may well be, also the making of theater. A Poetics of Modernity will likely prove a milestone in the transmission of Indian drama, performance, and intellectual history.”

An Honorable Mention was awarded to Shane Vogel of Yale University, for his monograph Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (University of Chicago Press). Stolen Time digs deep into the archive of the U.S. fad for calypso in the 1950s and discovers -- in records and movies, in photographs and trade journals, in scholarly accounts and mass-market magazines -- an intricate debate about authenticity and inauthenticity.  Far and yet not completely detached from the roots of calypso in the Caribbean, the fad Vogel analyzes constitutes an exemplary chapter in the history of racialized and mass-mediated representations in the U.S.  Drawing from and expanding debates in theater and performance studies, Stolen Time opens up a largely neglected moment in American popular culture and unravels the rich theoretical implications of that moment.

The Callaway Prize is awarded every two years 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.

The Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama was established in 1990 by Joe A. Callaway, an actor, drama lecturer, and supporter of theatrical causes.