Professor Jill Dolan receives Distinguished Scholar Award

Nov. 18, 2013
 
Distinguished Scholar Award presented by the American Society for Theatre Research

 

(Princeton, NJ)  Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English, Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University has received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theater Research (ASTR), a U.S.-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theatre and performance, both historical and contemporary.

 
  
The Distinguished Scholar Award is given each year to a scholar whose body of work has made a significant contribution to the field of theatre, dance, opera, and/or performance studies. Scholars are nominated by either a peer ASTR member or a previous winner of the award. The three immediately previous Distinguished Scholar Award winners consider the candidates and select the recipient, evaluating each nominee's involvement in ASTR and contribution to his or her field while making their decision. This year's evaluation panel consisted of past winners David Mayer (2012), Bruce McConachie (2011), and Janelle Reinelt (2010).

 
 
"Being acknowledged by your peers for a career's worth of work is a wonderful thing," Dolan noted in her blog, The Feminist Spectator, which won the prestigious George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 2011. 

 
 
The award was presented at the American Society for Theatre Research conference in Dallas on November 9.

 
 
The award committee commended Dolan as "someone who has been a visible presence in every aspect of our profession for over thirty years. Her research and writing, teaching and editing, theatre criticism and organizational leadership have resulted in outstanding contributions to the field of theatre and performance studies."

 
 
Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton in 2008, Dolan taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama and headed the Department of Theatre and Dance's MA/PhD program in performance as a public practice from 1999-2008. She has also been a professor of theater, performance, and feminist studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Dolan is a former president of the Women & Theater Program, from which she received a lifetime achievement award in 2011, and of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, from which she received the 2011 Outstanding Teacher Award. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989; reissued with a new introduction in 2012); Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005); and Theatre & Sexuality (2010), as well as several other books and many articles and essays on feminist and lesbian/gay/queer contemporary American theater. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.