Recognition for Drag Vistas and Visions celebrates the culmination of a three-volume editorial project exploring drag as a plural, international, and continually changing performing art form.

Professor Stephen Farrier, Deputy Principal of Rose Bruford College, and co-editor Dr Mark Edward have won the 2026 TaPRA Edited Collection Prize for Drag Vistas and Visions.

Published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury, in August 2025, the book is the third and final volume in the editors’ Drag in a Changing Scene trilogy. It considers drag as an art form, an identity category, and a political force, bringing academic research into conversation with artistic practice, activism, and personal reflection.

Cover, Drag Vistas and Visions, Volume 3, Drag in a Changing Scene

 

Across the trilogy, Farrier and Edward have traced drag’s contemporary practices, its relationships with history and memory, and its possible futures. The project began with Contemporary Drag Practices and Performers, followed by Drag Histories, Herstories and Hairstories, before concluding with Drag Vistas and Visions.

The final volume challenges the idea that drag can be understood as one fixed or easily defined practice. Its contributors examine questions including how queer Asian artists decolonise drag, how drag performance developed in China between 2010 and 2020, and how disability, access, and queer joy can become sources of creativity and resistance.

With a foreword by drag artist Cheddar Gorgeous, the collection draws on disciplines including performance studies, critical disability studies, media, philosophy, and linguistics. Together, these perspectives show how drag is shaped by race, class, disability, sexuality, geography, popular culture, and the communities in which it is created.

The book also asks wider questions. What is lost when familiar or mainstream accounts of drag become dominant? Whose practices and histories remain less visible? How can performers use drag to challenge established categories, and how should theatres, arts organisations, and audiences respond to the different cultural contexts from which the work emerges?

Editing a collection of this kind involves more than assembling individual chapters. The editors define its intellectual purpose, select and support contributors, connect different disciplines and perspectives, and create a framework through which the collection can be understood.

The TaPRA Edited Collection Prize recognises collections that define new approaches to theatre, dance, and performance research and open new areas of enquiry. Its criteria consider originality, significance, curation, diversity of voices, and how effectively a publication makes use of the edited collection form.

Professor Farrier said:

“Mark and I wanted this trilogy to make room for drag in all its forms, as art and identity, politics and history, research and lived experience. With this final volume, our task was to bring very different voices and disciplines into conversation. We did not want to arrive at one neat definition of drag, because drag has never belonged to just one tradition, one discipline, or one group of people. I am delighted that TaPRA has recognised what was, from beginning to end, a shared endeavour. Above all, I am grateful to every contributor who trusted us with their research, their practice, and their experience.”

Professor Farrier’s research at Rose Bruford College focuses on queer and popular performance, identity, research ethics, and lesser-told narratives. A consistent concern across his work is creating space for voices, histories, and practices that have been erased, made invisible, or silenced.

The award follows Professor Farrier’s previous shortlisting for the prize with Professor Alyson Campbell in 2017 for Queer Dramaturgies. The latest recognition celebrates Farrier and Edward’s sustained collaboration and the distinctive editorial scholarship behind their three-volume study of drag.

Everyone at Rose Bruford College warmly congratulates Professor Farrier,  Dr Mark Edward, and all the contributors to Drag Vistas and Visions.

 

Drag Vistas and Visions

Edited by Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier, Drag Vistas and Visions is the third and final volume in the Drag in a Changing Scene trilogy. It was published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury, in August 2025. View the official publication page.