Polster is Bound for England Thanks to Mann Stearns Award
With the help of the Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award, Performing Arts Assistant Professor Joshua Polster says he will be able to complete his book on the theatre of Arthur Miller. The award will fund research travel to library archives, interviews, theatre productions, and national and international theatre conferences. Polster plans to travel to England to gather interviews from cast, crew, and audiences of Synergy Theatre Project’s production of A Memory of Two Mondays for a chapter in his book.
“My next book will be a major reassessment of Miller’s plays and a significant semiotic study of his work,” Polster explained. “This book project will broaden the scholarship of Arthur Miller by positioning him as a creator of far more radical and innovative work than has been generally credited.”
Polster received the Norman and Irma Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award on October 28 at a luncheon hosted by President Jacqueline Liebergott. Polster, who teaches courses at Emerson in theatre history, dramatic theory, and dramaturgy, is the author of Reinterpreting the Plays of Arthur Miller and Methuen Drama’s critical articles of Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays.
“My next book will be a major reassessment of Miller’s plays and a significant semiotic study of his work. This book project will broaden the scholarship of Arthur Miller by positioning him as a creator of far more radical and innovative work than has been generally credited.”
The award, which was established by Norman Stearns and Irma Mann, provides a cash grant annually to a full-time faculty member to support a scholarly or creative endeavor in which travel is encouraged.
Last year’s recipient, Seounmi Han Youn, used the award to conduct extensive marketing research on online privacy concerns for teenagers. Youn researched teens’ vulnerability and resilience to disclosing personal information online through commercial and social media websites. She concluded that various socialization agents like parents, peers, teachers, and the mass media, contribute to a teens’ level of concern for privacy, and that effective communication between the agent and the teen is the best way to ensure online safety.
Youn presented her research to a number of marketing conferences, including the American Academy of Advertising in Minnesota, the e-Youth Multidisciplinary Conference in Belgium, and the Child and Teen Consumption Conference in Sweden. She has published her research in The Journal of Consumer Affairs.
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