Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts, has been honored by two organizations for his work as a theater educator. Photo by Natasha Moustache

Accolades

Harvey Young Named This Year’s American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Theater Scholar

CFA dean honored for his work focused on the role of race

Nationally recognized theater educator Harvey Young, dean of the BU College of Fine Arts, is this year’s recipient of the American Society for Theatre Research Distinguished Scholar Award.

The award is “a way of recognizing the work I’ve been doing in encouraging people to think about the role of race in performance,” says Young, a CFA professor of theater and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English. “That’s been the driving force of my scholarship, to really put a spotlight on the history of African American theater, to help people think about the role of race and also gender in the plays they watch and the plays they read.”

Young says the award is a big honor. “It’s still jarring and surprising to receive a career achievement award,” he says with a laugh. “I think of myself as still very much in the middle of my career. I’ve been a member of the society for 22 years—I joined while I was still a grad student—but I also think of myself as having 22 more years in the field as a scholar!”

Fellow scholars confirm that Young’s longtime focus on African American theater is not only significant but timely, given the racial reckoning that has reached many areas of American life.

“Harvey is a highly important scholar in a highly important field at this particular cultural moment—African American theater/performance and its history,” says Rhonda Blair, a Southern Methodist University professor emerita, a past president of the group, and the 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award winner. “His voice is truly changing and directing our field’s engagement with theater and performance studies right now, often by excavating and reframing our understanding of the past.”

The American Society for Theatre Research is a US-based professional organization that fosters scholarship on worldwide theater and performance, both historical and contemporary. The award is is given each year to a scholar whose body of work has made a significant contribution to the field of theater, dance, opera, and/or performance studies and who is also active in ASTR.

“I’m very happy that we were able to celebrate an African American scholar and leader in the field who writes primarily about African American theater and about race in the United States,” says Marla Carlson, ASTR president and a University of Georgia theater arts professor. “Harvey is also notable for his accomplishments as a public intellectual and as a leader in service to the field. So he would have been an excellent choice regardless of the organization’s current strategic priority to decenter whiteness in our conference, leadership, and field.”

Young received the award at the society’s annual conference in San Diego last week. “I write to create an arrangement—an ordering logic—for a tangle of thoughts that usually involve theater, popular culture, politics, and critical theory, alongside a pragmatic perspective on the challenges that continually confront nonwhite people of color,” Young said in his acceptance speech. “In working through this tangle of influences, I try to attend to the uniqueness of the historical moment while also spotlighting the ways in which history seems to fold onto itself.” 

The ASTR honor is not his first major award this year. Earlier he was named to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, one of the highest honors bestowed on educators and professionals of the theater community. A nonprofit organization of 132 members, the college meets under the auspices of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts education department in Washington, D.C.

Before joining CFA, Young was a professor and chair of theater at Northwestern University, where his students included Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, then a double major in theater and international studies. Since being named dean of CFA in 2018, he has continued teaching, including African American Theatre, a class he created, where BU undergraduates often find themselves in conversation with some of today’s top Black theater-makers. His numerous books and publications include The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which he edited, and Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body  (University of Michigan Press, 2010), winner of Book of the Year awards from the National Communication Association and the ASTR.

“He is on the ‘young’ side of receiving this award, but the capaciousness, multifacetedness, and impact of his engagement demanded that we pay attention to his candidacy,” says Blair, who made up the award committee with the two other most recent honorees, Sandra Richards, a Northwestern University professor emerita, and Ric Knowles, University of Guelph University Professor Emeritus.