麻豆视频

Assistant professor鈥檚 New York-based independent press receives recognition for increasing access to scholarly work in the field of performance studies

Marcos Steuernagel, a 麻豆视频 theatre professor, and four colleagues from the groundbreaking, independent publisher HemiPress, have won an award for excellence in digital scholarship.

Presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the award recognizes HemiPress鈥檚 success in utilizing digital publishing means while maintaining the rigorous standards of traditional, academic print publishing.

By publishing digitally in three or more languages, HemiPress, the digital imprint of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, provides access to scholarly work in the field of performance studies to those who might otherwise never have it, or need to wait a decade or longer for a translation of a work.

For Steuernagel, the award recognizes the institute鈥檚 efforts to address topical questions: 鈥淲hat does publishing academic material on performance mean today in 2017? What does academic publication mean for scholarship on performance, in a multilingual environment, in the current digital era?鈥�

Steuernagel celebrates the achievement with a degree of pride. He began working with the Hemispheric Institute as Program Coordinator for Digital Books while a doctoral student in performance studies at New York University in 2010. Under the leadership of founding director Diana Taylor, and in partnership with the University of Southern California鈥檚 Scalar Platform and Duke University Press, the institute published the trilingual digital books What is Performance Studies (2015) and Dancing with the Zapatistas (2015).

In 2017, the institute merged its four digital-publication initiatives under one umbrella, which ultimately became HemiPress: the growing book initiative in which Steuernagel and Hemispheric were already engaged; 别尘颈蝉蹿茅谤颈肠补, the peer-reviewed, trilingual (English, Spanish and Portuguese) journal published biannually by the institute; 鈥淐uadernos,鈥� online curations of multimedia material focused on particular topics or bodies of work relating to performance and politics in the Americas; and 鈥淕esture,鈥� a new initiative that publishes short, evocative multilingual digital works that combine multimedia and literature to create an original, critical intervention in the fields of performance and politics.

Taylor founded the Hemispheric Institute in 1998. Today, it serves as a consortium of more than 60 universities, cultural centers, human-rights and social-justice organizations and participating individuals numbering in the thousands. CU Boulder is a member institution. The institute aims to create a forum in which activists, scholars and artists from across the Americas generate creative opportunities for 鈥渃ritical reflection鈥� sparking lasting cultural change.鈥�

鈥淚f we are to understand the relationship between performance and politics in the Americas,鈥� said Steuernagel, 鈥渢hen digital plays an important part. We鈥檙e addressing this through some very real projects.鈥�

All digital platforms and software are considered for the ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship.

The other co-investigators named on the award are Diana Taylor (director of the Hemispheric Institute), Marcial Godoy-Anativia (managing director of the Hemispheric Institute), Alexei Taylor (HemiPress lead developer and designer) and Olivia Michiko Gagnon (managing editor of HemiPress).

鈥淒iana Taylor is one of the most important names in the articulation between performance and politics and Latin American theater and performance studies,鈥� said Steuernagel, who says Taylor is one of the first scholars to consider the possibilities for digital media in the field of performance studies in the Americas.

According to Steuernagel, scholars discuss whether 鈥減erformance only happens in the live moment.鈥� Taylor argues 鈥渢hat the digital allows for a new kind of scholarship in terms of accessibility and one鈥檚 relationship with audio-visual material.鈥�

Taylor is best known for her 2013 book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke U.P.), winner of the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004).

In that work, she takes on the idea that 鈥渒nowledge only lives in the archive鈥� and considers the permanence we associate with it in opposition to 鈥減erformed practices and to the repertoire,鈥� said Steuernagel.

鈥淩ecently she鈥檚 also been thinking about how the digital complicates this dichotomy between the archive and the repertoire and produces knowledge in a new place,鈥� which is arguably the driving force behind HemiPress.

HemiPress books are produced both on Scalar鈥攖he University of Southern California鈥檚 digital publishing platform鈥攁nd on Tome, an online authoring tool that facilitates long-form publishing in an immersive, media-rich environment. The digital books have been through the same editorial scrutiny and review that all academic work published at Duke University Press receives.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think anyone else is doing exactly what we鈥檙e doing,鈥� said Steuernagel. Companion volumes to academic works are often available online; the website model exists, of posting content with limited editorial care; and a great deal of work has been published on Scalar and received awards and attention.

鈥淏ut I can鈥檛 think of any in particular that have been done in partnership with an established print academic press and requires the academic rigor we鈥檙e talking about.鈥�

The production process is still new to HemiPress, 鈥渁nd because of that it takes a long time,鈥� said Steuernagel. Collecting and conducting the interviews used in Performance Studies started in 2001, with book production beginning only in 2012. Dancing with the Zapatistas went into production around the same time, both in partnership with Scalar and Duke University Press.

鈥淲e didn鈥檛 have precedence,鈥� said Steuernagel. 鈥淲e鈥檝e never sent a born-digital book to peer review. The reviewers at Duke were trying to figure out who to send it to, because they didn鈥檛 have multilingual reviewers who could look at it. So how do we do that?鈥� said Steuernagel. 鈥淎nd how do we do it through translation?鈥�

The end product, however, is a digital book that has been peer-reviewed by reputable scholars, and has the imprint of Duke University Press, along with HemiPress, and a date of a publication.

But the multilinguality, Steuernagel stresses, is central to HemiPress鈥檚 mission. Print books can take years to come out in Brazil, Mexico or across Latin America, but HemiPress鈥檚 books are published in Spanish, English and Portuguese in their original form. Therefore, it grants access to these works to people who previously had none.

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