Theatre Library Association Announces 2017 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 2017.
The 2017 George Freedley Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of live theatre or performance will be awarded to by Sarah E. Chinn for Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, published by Oxford University Press. A Special Jury Prize will be awarded to by Cindy Rosenthal for Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theater published by the University of Michigan Press. This year’s Freedley Award Jury consisted of James Fisher, Annie Holt, and Don Wilmeth.
The 2017 Richard Wall Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of recorded performance will be awarded to Steven J. Ross, for Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, published by Bloomsbury USA. A Special Jury Prize will be awarded to Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley for Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy, published by the University of California Press. This year’s Wall Award Jury consisted of David Pierce, Shelley Stamp, and Stephen Tropiano.
The following were finalists for the 2017 Freedley Award:
- Arnold Aronson, Editor, The Routledge Companion to Scenography, Routledge
- Lisa A. Freeman, Antitheatricality and the Body Public, University of Pennsylvania Press
- Odai Johnson, London in a Box: Englishness and Theatre in Revolutionary America, University of Iowa Press
- Heather S. Nathans, Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage, University of Michigan Press
- Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Matthew Wilson Smith, The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre, Oxford University Press
The following were finalists for the 2017 Wall Award:
- David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, University of Chicago Press
- Glenn Frankel, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of An American Classic, Bloomsbury USA
- Jennifer Fronc, Monitoring the Movies: The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America, University of Texas Press
- Rob King, Hokum!The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture, University of California Press
- Rielle Navitski, Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil, Duke University Press
- Alan K. Rode,Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, University Press of Kentucky
The 2017 TLA Book Awards will be presented to the winners at a ceremony in the Café of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in New York City, at 7:00 PM on Friday October 12, 2018. Additional event and registration information to follow.