The American Society for Theatre Research has awarded Director of Fellowships and Professor of Theater Stacy Wolf with a Distinguished Scholar Award. The prestigious award is given yearly to a scholar whose body of work has made a significant contribution to the fields of theater, dance, opera, or performance studies.
Stacy Wolf. Photo credit: Sameer A. Khan / Fotobuddy
The Founding Director of Music Theater at Princeton, Wolf is one of America’s foremost scholars on musical theater. She is the author of A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (2002); Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011); and Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America, which was a finalist for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2020 Outstanding Book Award. An excerpt from Beyond Broadway, “Out of the Spotlight, Still a Star: The ‘Backstage Diva,’” was published in the New York Times.
Wolf co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical (2011) and “Sondheim from the Side,” a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre (2023) that brings together personal reflections on Sondheim’s musicals by women, queers, Jews, people of color, and others. Wolf has published widely on musical theatre and U.S. culture, including articles on Hamilton and gender and on college student productions of Sondheim’s musicals in the age of #MeToo. Her current research projects include an article about the composer Jeanine Tesori and a book, Feminist Approaches to Musical Theatre, which she is co-writing with Paige Allen, a member of Princeton’s Class of 2021.
Wolf teaches seminars on gender and race in the American musical, including a class on the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, and she regularly offers public lectures about musical theatre.
In addition to ASTR’s Distinguished Scholar Award, Wolf has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Bogliasco Fellowships, a President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching from Princeton.
Founded in 1956, the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) is a U.S.-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theater and performance, both historical and contemporary. ASTR sponsors or coordinates several awards, grants, fellowships, and prizes to support and recognize outstanding scholarship in theater and performance studies. Other Lewis Center faculty members who have won awards from ASTR for their scholarship include Lewis Center Chair Judith Hamera and Professor of English and Theater Jill Dolan.
