Two Notre Dame faculty members in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) are on the Short List of Finalists for the Barnard Hewitt Award through the American Society for Theatre Research. Tarryn Chun was nominated for Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China and Patrick McKelvey for Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation. The final award will be announced in November. Both authors have already received outstanding recognition for their books.
Tarryn Chun is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of FTT, holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and is a Faculty Fellow at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Her recent book Revolutionary Stagecraft (University of Michigan Press, 2024) traces modern Chinese theatre history through stage technologies such as set design, lighting plots, and prop schematics to reveal the "complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus." Chun’s book previously won the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association as well as the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, which was announced in August.
Patrick McKelvey is Associate Professor of Theatre in the Department of FTT. Disability Works (NYU Press, 2024) examines the relationship between US disability policy and the disability arts and culture movement from 1960 - 1990, demonstrating how disabled artists and activists both embraced and reimagined rehabilitative resources of the time for their own practice and fostered more just institutions. McKelvey has already been awarded the Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies by the National Communication Association, the C.L.R. James Award from the Working-Class Studies Association, and the Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association GLBTQ Communication Studies Division for Disability Works. He also received a 2025-26 National Humanities Center Fellowship to write his second book of disability performance history, Supporting Actors: Disability, Infrastructure, Performance.
Named for a theatre historian, professor, and the first editor of what is now Theatre Journal, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History is awarded each year to the best book in theatre history or associated disciplines published during the previous calendar year. The American Society for Theatre Research is a US-based organization that fosters contemporary and historical scholarship on worldwide theatre and performance through networking, awards, grants, fellowships, and prizes that support outstanding scholarship in the field.
Read the full announcement at the American Society for Theatre Research