Theatre Library Association Announces 2016 Book Award Winners
The Theatre Library Association is proud to announce the TLA Book Award winners for English language works of scholarship on theatre, film, and broadcasting, published in 2016.
The 2016 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance will be awarded to Peter Benes for For a Short Time Only: Itinerants and the Resurgence of Popular Culture in Early America, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
A Special Jury Prize will be awarded to Edna Nahshon for New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway, published by the Columbia University Press.
This year’s Freedley Award Jury consists of James Fisher, Annie Holt, and Don Wilmeth.
The following works were finalists for the 2016 Freedley Award:
- Robert S. Bader, Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage, Northwestern University Press
- David Carlyon, The Education of a Circus Clown: Mentors, Audiences, Mistakes, Palgrave Macmillan
- Julia H. Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696-1801, University of Michigan Press
- David Monod, The Soul of Pleasure: Sentiment and Sensation in Nineteenth-Century American Mass Entertainment, Cornell University Press
- Dassia N. Posner, The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, Northwestern University Press
- Joel Schechter, Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole, University of Exeter Press
- Richard Schoch, Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900, Cambridge University Press
- Jack Viertel, The Secret Life of the American Musical, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Robin O. Warren, Women on Southern Stages, 1800-1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater, McFarland
- Jonas Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld’s Rivals,Oxford University Press
The 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of recorded performance will be awarded to William Paul for When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film, published by Columbia University Press.
A Special Jury Prize will be awarded to Alan Robert Ginsberg for The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal, published by Syracuse University Press.
This year’s Wall Award Jury consisted of John Calhoun, David Pierce, and Stephen Tropiano.
The following works were finalists for the 2016 Wall Award:
- Kevin Brianton, Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist, University Press of Kentucky
- Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System, University of Texas Press
- Laura Horak, Girls Will be Boys: Cross Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934, Rutgers University Press
- Richard Lowell MacDonald, The Appreciation of Film: The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain, University of Exeter Press
- Frank Noack, Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker, University Press of Kentucky
The 2016 TLA Book Awards will be presented to the winners at a gala celebration in the Café of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in New York City, at 7:00 PM on Friday October 13, 2017. Event registration will be open on September 13th here.