Awards

Each year, AAP recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field through two awards: the Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize and the Emerging Scholars Award. The prizes support early-career researchers and highlight new contributions to the study of Asian theatre and performance.

CAROL FISHER SORGENFREI PRIZE

The Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize for Japanese Theatre is designed to promote and encourage the study of Japanese theatre and performance, given to an early career scholar for an outstanding article, chapter, or essay on Japanese theatre or performance published in English during the current calendrical year in a journal, online journal, or book.

The deadline for submission is May 1 each year. Submissions may be made through the AAP website or sent directly to Jessica Nakamura, Chair of the Prize Committee, at jnakamura@ucsb.edu.

The Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Prize for Japanese Theatre is named for Dr. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, whose scholarship and creative work have made significant contributions to the study and practice of Japanese theatre.

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a playwright, director and scholar/translator of modern and contemporary Japanese theatre. She attended Pomona College (BA), the University of California, Santa Barbara (MA and PhD) and spent a year at International Christian University in Mitaka, Japan.

She is Professor Emerita at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and Research Fellow Emerita at the Institute for Interweaving Performance Cultures (Free University, Berlin, Germany). She is honored to be a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

Carol authored Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (2005) and co-authored Theatre Histories: An Introduction (3rd ed. 2016). She is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and the former Editor of the Association for Asian Performance Newsletter.

Original plays include the multi-award-winning Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth (published by Samuel French); Snake Oil; Ghost Light: The Haunting; A Wilderness of Monkeys; The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds and the kabuki-flamenco Blood Wine, Blood Wedding.

RECIPIENTS

2025

Jyana S. Browne, "Puppetry Networks of the Island of Naoshima,” Theatre Research International, vol. 49, no. 2 (July 2024): 188-202.
Honorable Mention: Sylwia Dobkowska, "Okinawan Absence: Ma in Kumiodori," Theatre Research International, vol. 49, no. 3 (January 2025): 265-279.

2024

Beri Juriac and Hagiwara Yuta, "Memory of Nanjing: Kamome Machine’s Experiments in Sharing Thoughts," Etudes, vol. 9, no. 1 (2023).

2023

Colleen Lanki and Tsuneda Keiko, "A Journal of the Plague Year by Terayama Shūji in Collaboration with Kishida Rio: 'Contagious Magic' for a Time of Epidemic," Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, (Spring 2022): 1-53.

2022

Justine Wiesinger "Glacier or Iceberg? Spatial, Temporal, and Contextual Distance in an International Performance of Okada Toshiki's Time's Journey Through a Room," Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 38, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 101-125.

EMERGING SCHOLARS AWARD

AAP’s Adjudicated Emerging Scholars Panel is an annual, peer-reviewed panel organized by AAP to support early-career scholars and those newly engaging the study of Asian performance. A call for submissions is typically circulated in the winter (between December and February), with selected participants invited to present their work at the AAP annual conference. Outstanding submissions are considered for publication in Asian Theatre Journal (ATJ), AAP’s official journal. The panel serves as a recurring venue for introducing emerging scholarship to the field and facilitating the transition from conference presentation to peer-reviewed publication.

Please direct any inquiries regarding the Emerging Scholars Award panel to Rini Tarafder at
tarafder.rini@gmail.com.

RECIPIENTS

2025

Yao Xu, "Incentivizing the New: The Ethics and Politics of Innovation within the Young Artists Platform"
Dahye Lee, "Shaping New Koreanness: Training Systems for Changjak Chum (‘Newly Created Dance’) of South Korea"
Ruijiao Dong, "Actresses, Masculinity, and Misogyny in Professionalizing Modern Chinese Theatre"

2024

Yu-ning Liu, "Différance Jingju: From Three Persons and Two Lamps to Smoke-locked Palace"
Chee-Hann Wu, "Puppets, Trauma, and Performative Remembering: Flip Flops Theatre’s Lala: The Singing Bear (2019) and I Promised I Wouldn’t Cry (2019)
Minu Park, "When the Oxygen Mask Becomes Excess: The Ethics of Cultural Preservation and Haenyeo Kitchen’s Food Ecology"

2023

Yihui Sheng, "The Performers’ Brush: A Case Study of Scene Twelve 'Composing the Score' ('Zhipu') in a Mid-Qing Stage Script of Changsheng dian (Palace of Everlasting Life)"
Hanyang Jiang, "A Babel of Nature: The English-Language Sources of Zheng Junli’s 'Tan biaoyan' (On Acting, 1936)"

2022

Sharvari Sastry, "The Many Uses of Censorship: Cultural Regulation on Tamasha in Maharashtra"
Priscilla Tse, "'One Opera, Two Nationalisms': Negotiating Hong Kong Identity and Chinese Nationalism in Cantonese Opera"
Zhixuan Zhu, "Modernist Visions Beyond the Horizon of History: The Theatricality of Bai Wei’s Rarely Staged Plays"

2021

Hyo Jeong Hong, "Global Modernizing Gestures in Staging a New Theatre"
Xiaoqiao Xu, "Desire for Connection: Qiao Ying (The Fake Image) and Portrait-Reading"

2020

Hayana Kim, "Performing Democracy on Stage: ToBakYi’s Kumhi’s May and the Politics of Mourning in South Korea"
Amanda Culp, "Prakrits in Performance: Theatricality and Multilingual Drama in Premodern India"

2019

Chao Guo, "Cultural Anxiety and the Reconstruction of the Xiqu Tradition through Mei Lanfang's Overseas Performances, 1919–1930"
Sebastian Samur, "Rhythmic Tendencies in the Choreographies of Dairakudakan's Muramatsu Takuya"

2018

Dwaipayan Chowdhury, "Applying/Contesting the Brechtian "Model": Calcutta Repertory Theatre's Galileor Jibon (Life of Galileo)"
Sophia Yashih Liu, "Performing Intercultural Trauma: State, Land, and Women in Troy, Troy… Taiwan"
Nathan F. Bullock, "Spaces of Citizenship in Contemporary Singaporean Theatre: Staging the 2011 General Election"

2017

Megan Ammirati, "Uncle Tom's Cabin in China: Ouyang Yuqian's Regret of a Black Slave and the Tactics of Impersonating Race, Gender, and Class"

2016

Yi-Hsin Hsu, "Lee Hyon-u's Hamlet Q1 and Pedagogical Performance on the Korean Stage: Textual Identity in Intercultural Theatre"

2015

Sophia Tingting Zhao, "Reorienting the Gaze in Mei Lanfang’s Lyrical Theatre: Performing Female Interiority"
Wei Zhang, "Adapting Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan: Innovative Chuanju and Yueju in China’s Transition"

2014

K. Frances Lieder, "Not-Feminism: A Discourse on the Politics of a Term in Modern Indian Theatre"

2013

Jiayun Zhuang, "River! River! River! A Minjian Eco-Theatre"
Kati Fitzgerald, "Tibetan Opera in and outside the Tibet Autonomous Region"

2012

Cheng Fan-Ting, "Dreamers' Nightmare: The Melancholia of the Taiwanese Centennial Celebration"
Guanda Wu, "Should Nandan Be Abolished?: The Debate over Female Impersonation in Early Republican China and Its Underlying Cultural Logic"
Jae Kyoung Kim, "Suzuki Tadashi's Intercultural Progress in South Korea"

2011

Emily Wilcox, "Han-Tang Zhongguo Gudianwu and the Problem of Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Dance: Sixty Years of Creation and Controversy"
Melissa Wansin Wong, "Negotiating Class, Taste, and Culture via the Arts Scene in Singapore: Postcolonial or Cosmopolitan Global?"
Khai Thu Nguyen, "Personal Sorrow: Cải Lương and the Politics of North and South Vietnam"
Kristen Rudisill, "Everyday Flamboyancy in Chennai's Sabha Theatre"