UQ PhD student takes home top prize at ADSA Conference

23 December 2022

 

Congratulations to the School's PhD (Creative Writing) candidate Sarah Wilson who has taken out the prestigious Veronica Kelly Prize for best postgraduate paper at this year's ADSA Conference in Auckland. ADSA - the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies - is the major network in the field, and Sarah's paper was entitled "Our Own Time and Space: Locating Autistic Poetics in Theatre." She wins cash(!) and mentoring to convert the paper into a journal article in Australasian Drama Studies.

 In awarding the prize to Sarah, the judging panel stated " Sarah has offered language and a dramaturgical framework for interpreting and interacting with diverse creative practice scholarship. The intersectional theorisation of autistic dramaturgy was compelling, applied to two distinct case studies in a nuanced way within an access-led approach, and offers findings and insights that are translatable beyond the specifics of this research project."

Speaking of her participation at the conference Sarah said, "It was my first discipline conference, so it was sort of surreal but also exhilarating to look at people's nametags and see authors I've been citing."

 The project is part of a playwriting PhD project at UQ supervised by Dr Beck Wise, Prof. Chris Hay and Assoc. Prof. Stephen Carleton.

 The conference was a boon for UQ HDRs, with our students making up by far the largest contingent of any university in Australia or New Zealand. All delivered superb papers, and their dynamic presence was noted by all attending. Other drama and playwriting students who presented were: Sue-Anne Wallace (who, along with Sarah, received a Geoffrey Milne postgraduate bursary to attend), Rhumer Diball, Caitlin West, Pierce Wilcox, Daniel Lammin, Oliver Gough, and Gareth Belling, who is also the postgraduate representative for ADSA in 2022/2023. 

Sarah notes of her UQ peers, "The UQ postgrad contingent strategized to ensure our colleagues always had a couple of friendly faces in their audience. We were a big group but I felt so supported, and I especially appreciate my colleagues' generosity with feedback to assist in polishing my paper."

 Congratulations to all of the UQ HDRs for their outstanding contribution to this major theatre studies conference.

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