UP prof wins international prize for paper on komedya

MANILA, Philippines –  University of the Philippines-Diliman College of Arts and Letters Assistant Professor and Department of Speech Communication and Theater Arts alumnus Anril Tiatco has won the 2011 New Scholars Prize from the International Federation for Theater Research (IFTR) for his research on cosmopolitanism and the Philippine komedya.

The prize will be awarded during the IFTR conference in Osaka, Japan in August.

Tiatco was project director of the international conference on the komedya organized by UP Diliman in 2008, for which several papers on the localized Spanish theater form were written and delivered. Tiatco was also an assistant editor of the last issue of the Philippine Humanities Review, launched in December 2010, which featured these papers and papers on the zarzuela, another localized theater form. The speech and theater expert is a recent Palanca award-winner for drama.

IFTR runs the annual essay competition for New Scholars, in which candidates are encouraged to submit work, drawing on their current research. The New Scholars Prize is awarded to the best essay, judged on originality, coherence, and scholastic rigor. The prize enables the winner to attend the IFTR Conference. The winning essay may also be considered for publication in Theatre Research International.

The IFTR defines the New Scholar as a graduate student or post-doctoral researcher whose PhD was completed less than three years ago; or a researcher without a PhD who has occupied an academic post for less than three years.