The Selma Jeanne Cohen Award is a writing award offered by the
Dance Studies Association
Dance is a performing art art form, form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolism (arts), symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its chor ...
(DSA) for the best graduate student paper submission to the annual conference. Prior to the DSA's foundation in 2017, the award was sponsored by the
Society of Dance History Scholars
The Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) was a professional organization for dance historians in the United States and internationally. Founded in 1978, it became a non-profit in 1983. SDHS became a member of the American Council of Learned So ...
. The award was established in 1995 to honor
Selma Jeanne Cohen
Selma Jeanne Cohen (September 18, 1920December 23, 2005) was a historian, teacher, author, and editor who devoted her career to advocating dance as an art worthy of the same scholarly respect traditionally awarded to painting, music, and literatur ...
's contributions to the field of dance history, and to encourage and recognize exemplary scholarship among students researching dance.
Selma Jeanne Cohen Award, Dance Studies Association
/ref> The award includes a travel grant and registration fee waiver for the annual conference.
Award winners
*2018 - Natalia Duong, “Agent Orange Ecologies: Choreographing Kinship in Rhizophora”
* 2018 - Sammy Roth, “Reproducing the Foreclosed White Body: Racial Imaginary and White Womanhood in Competition Dance”
* 2018 - Jessica Friedman, ”Josephine Baker’s Decolonial Corporeal Borderland”
* 2016 - Jennifer Aubrecht, “Rethinking Appropriation: The Reciprocal Relationship of Yoga and American Modern Dance”
* 2015 - Naomi Bragin, “Global Street Dance and Libidinal Economy”
* 2015 - Brianna Figueroa, “Economies of The Flesh: Scripting Puerto Rican Colonial History Through Dance”
* 2014 - Melissa Melpignano, “Dancing Texts: Writing the Presence of the Dancing Bodies in Dance Librettos”
* 2014 - Anne Vermeyden, “The Reda Folk Dance Company and Egyptian Cultural Nationalism: Writing Dance as History”
* 2014 Katja Vaghi, “Deixis on Dance: Locating the Audience’s Experience in Time, Space, and Persona”
* 2013 - Rachel Carrico, “On the Street and in the Studio: Decentering and Recentering Dance in the New Orleans Second Line”
* 2013 - Sinibaldo De Rosa, “Samah: Kardeşlik Töreni — A Dynamic Bodily Archive For The Alevi Semah”
* 2013 - Mique’l Dangeli, “Dancing Our Politics: Contemporary Issues in Northwest Coast First Nations Dance”
* 2013 (Honorable Mention) - Priya Thomas, “Remote Choreography and the Ghost”
* 2013 - Kelly Klein, “Ecological Consciousness through Somatic Practice in Community-Based Performance: Palissimo’s ‘Bastard’”
* 2013 - Suparna Banerjee, “I and digi-I: reading the ‘digital double’ in the contemporary Bharatanatyam choreographies”
* 2013 - Jingqiu Guan, “The Protesting Arabesque”
* 2012 – Amanda Graham, “Out of Site, Trisha Brown
Trisha Brown (November 25, 1936 – March 18, 2017) was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement. Brown’s dance/movement method, with which she and her dancers ...
’s ''Roof Piece''”
* 2012 – Jessica Ray Herzogenrath, “Building National Character: Urbanization, Americanization and Folk Dance in Chicago, 1890-1940”
* 2012 – Munjulika Rahman, “Dancing in the (Socialist) City: Bangladesh at the 1979 International Folk in Zagreb”
* 2011 – Daniel Callahan, “Absolutely Unmanly: The Music Visualizations of Ted Shawn
Ted Shawn (born Edwin Myers Shawn; October 21, 1891 – January 9, 1972) was a male pioneer of American modern dance. He created the Denishawn School together with his wife Ruth St. Denis. After their separation he created the all-male company Te ...
and His Men Dancers”
* 2011 (Honorable Mention) - Virginia Preston, “Fire in the Soul: Claude de l’Estoile’s ''ballet de cour
''Ballet de cour'' ("court ballet") is the name given to ballets performed in the 16th and 17th centuries at courts.
The court ballet was a gathering of noblemen and women, as the cast and audience were largely supplied by the ruling class. The fe ...
'', Episodic Composition and the Radical Erotics of Globalization”
* 2010 - No prize awarded.
* 2009 - Anusha Kedhar, "The Specter of the Devadasi: Bharata Natyam and Indian Ethnicity in the U.S."
* 2009 - Hannah Kosstrin, "Of Dreams and Prayers: Topographies of Anna Sokolow's Holocaust Work During and After World War II"
* 2008 - Elizabeth Arden Thomas, "Moving Forward by Being Still: Anna Halprin
Anna Halprin (born Hannah Dorothy Schuman; July 13, 1920 – May 24, 2021) was an American choreographer and dancer. She helped redefine dance in postwar America and pioneer the experimental art form known as postmodern dance and referred to hers ...
's ''Still Dance with Nature''"
* 2008 - Victoria Phillips Geduld, "Cultural Diplomacy and the Construction of Empire: Martha Graham
Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.
Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She wa ...
's ''Appalachian Spring'' and the State Department Tour of 1955-1956"
* 2008 - Victoria Fortuna, "Decelerating Movement: The Identity Politics of Time and Space in Rudy Perez's ''Countdown''"
* 2007 - Clare Croft, "Photographs and Dancing Bodies: Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey Jr. (January 5, 1931 – December 1, 1989) was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). He created AAADT and its affiliated Alvin Ailey American Dance Cente ...
's 1967 US State Department Sponsored Tour of Africa"
* 2007 - Samuel N. Dorf, "'Greek' Desires in Paris: Isadora Duncan Dances Antiquity in the Lesbian Salon"
* 2007 - Sydney Hutchinson, "When Women Lead: Changing Gender Roles in the New York Salsa
Salsa most often refers to:
* Salsa (Mexican cuisine), a variety of sauces used as condiments
* Salsa music, a popular style of Latin American music
* Salsa (dance), a Latin dance associated with Salsa music
Salsa or SALSA may also refer to:
A ...
Scene"
* 2006 - No prize awarded.
* 2005 - Juliet Bellow, "Picasso's Puppets: Petrouchka
''Petrushka'' (french: link=no, Pétrouchka; russian: link=no, Петрушка) is a ballet and orchestral concert work by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1911 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes compan ...
, Pierrot and Parade"
* 2005 - Öykü Potuoglu-Cook, "From Backstage to Back Streets: An Urban Ethnography of the Post-1980s Turkish ''Belly Dance''"
* 2004 - Danielle Robinson, "Invisible Men: The Professionalization of Black Dance Teaching in Jazz Age Manhattan"
* 2004 - Emily Winerock, "Dance References in the Records of Early English Drama The Records of Early English Drama (REED) is a performance history research project, based at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in 1976 by a group of international scholars interested in understanding “the native tradition ...
: Alternative Sources for Non-Courtly Dancing, 1500-1650"
* 2003 - Yvonne Hardt, "Relational Movement Patterns: Movement Choirs and their Social Potential in the ''Weimar Republic''"
* 2002 - Victoria Watts, "How Do Dances Make Us Laugh?: A Comparative Analysis of the Joking Structure at Play in Tere O'Connor's ''Hi Everybody!'' (1999) and Twyla Tharp
Twyla Tharp (; born July 1, 1941) is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966 she formed the company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often uses classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.
Fr ...
's ''Push Comes to Shove'' (1976)"
* 2001 - Jonathan David Jackson, "Gender Representation in the Latest Form of the Black/Latino(a) Sexual Minority Dance Called 'Voguing'"
* 2000 - Martin Hargreaves, "Haunted by Failure, Doomed by Success: Melancholic Masculinity in AMP’s ''Swan Lake''"
* 1999 - Virginia Taylor, "Respect, Antipathy, and Tenderness: Why Do Girls 'Go to Ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
'?"
* 1999 - Anthea Kraut, "The Vernacular Transformations of Black Female Choreographers: Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker (born Freda Josephine McDonald; naturalised French Joséphine Baker; 3 June 1906 – 12 April 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted Fran ...
, Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on Hoodoo (spirituality), hoodoo. The most ...
, and Katherine Dunham
Katherine Mary Dunham (June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for ma ...
"
* 1998 - Janet O'Shea, "Unbalancing the Authentic/Partnering Tradition: Shobana Jeyasingh’s ''Romance... with Footnotes''"
* 1997 - Michelle Heffner, "Blood Wedding: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Flamenco
Flamenco (), in its strictest sense, is an art form based on the various folkloric music traditions of southern Spain, developed within the gitano subculture of the region of Andalusia, and also having historical presence in Extremadura and ...
"
* 1997 - Karen A. Mozingo, "Fractured Images: Montage and Gender in Pina Bausch
Philippine "Pina" Bausch (27 July 1940 – 30 June 2009) was a German dancer and choreographer who was a significant contributor to a neo-expressionist dance tradition now known as . Bausch's approach was noted for a stylized blend of dance mov ...
's ''Tanztheater''"
* 1996 - Ananya Chatterjea
Ananya Chatterjea is a contemporary Indian dancer and scholar. She is the founder, artistic director, and choreographer of Ananya Dance Theatre, a professional, contemporary Indian dance company composed of women artists of color. She is also a pro ...
, "The Choreography of '' Chandralekha''"
* 1996 - Julia L. Foulkes, "Feminists, in a Way: How Women Shaped Modern Dance"
* 1996 - Barbejoy A. Ponzio, "Mythic Images of the West and the Renewed Popularity of Country Dance"
* 1995 - Constance Valis Hill, "From Bharata Natyam to Jive: Jack Cole's 'Modern' Jazz Dance" ee Jack Cole (choreographer).">Jack_Cole_(choreographer).html" ;"title="ee Jack Cole (choreographer)">ee Jack Cole (choreographer).* 1995 - Maribeth Clark, "The Country dance">Contredanse, That Musical Plague"
Notes and references
{{reflist
External links
Selma Jeanne Cohen Award
- submission information and past recipients
Dance Studies Association Awards
Dance Studies Association
Dance awards
Awards established in 1995
Student awards