Award:
Barbara Palmer Award
Award Year:
2025
Winner: Brazil, Sarah. “Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays.” postmedieval 15.1 (2024): 49–86. DOI: 10.1057/s41280-023-00301-2.
The MRDS is pleased to award Sarah Brazil the 2025 Barbara Palmer award for her article “Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays” published in postmedieval. Through an analysis of anti-Black stagecraft, Brazil critiques how theatrical practices reproduce racial hierarchies. Simultaneously, she examines the juxtaposition of anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic tropes, revealing how performance enacts and sustains interwoven systems of exclusion. By framing performance as research, Brazil demonstrates how embodied practices expose, resist, and sometimes perpetuate these oppressive narratives. We were impressed with this fresh approach to these plays, the meticulous archival work that went into this essay, and especially Brazil’s ability to transcend the borders of time, space, and language.
Committee: Mario Longtin, Kirsten Mendoza, and Jeff Stoyanoff (chair). Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2025, at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.