Ann Cooper Albright Wins Honor for Book

The latest book by Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright has been selected to receive the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics. The prize includes an award of $1,000 and travel expenses to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics from October 29 through November 1 in San Antonio, Texas.

Begun in 2008, the biennial award honors Selma Jeanne Cohen, an eminent scholar and dance historian. It is given to a published work of distinction that contributes to dance aesthetics, dance theory, or the history of dance. Selections must be published in venues with peer review recognized by the scholarly community and be permanently available to the scholarly community of students and researchers.

Albright’s book Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality, was published in 2013. A dance scholar, her writing reflects an interdisciplinary approach to viewing and thinking about dance. For 25 years, she has taught a variety of dance, performance studies, and gender studies courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. In Engaging Bodies, which she dedicated to her students, movement and ideas lean on one another to produce a critical theory anchored in the material reality of dancing bodies.

“I am thrilled to be awarded this prize, and, given that I was a philosophy major in college, this honor takes me full circle back to my roots in thinking about the potent aesthetic experience of live performance,” Albright says.