The Federal Theatre Project: Uncovering Changes in Playscripts of Popular Performances
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
About the Lecture:
Amy Brady discussed the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), America's first and only nationally subsidized theater, and how hyperspectral imaging helped to elucidate the history of some of the FTP most popular performances. With the support of a CLIR/Mellon fellowship, Amy Brady, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, spent nine months researching in the FTP archive at the Library of Congress.
This archive houses more than 500,000 pieces of Federal Theatre-related ephemera, including playscripts that were marked up by directors and other FTP personnel. These markings have faded over time or were intentionally erased, but some of them were recovered via the Library's hyperspectral imaging unit housed in the Preservation and Testing Division. The recovery of these markings allows Amy and future scholars to learn more about the scripts' evolution from creation to final performance.
Speakers:
Amy Brady is an instructor at Kean University and a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is completing a dissertation that combines textual analyses and performance reconstruction of plays performed for and written by the Federal Theatre Project. Much of her dissertation data was gathered at the Library of Congress thanks to a generous CLIR/Library of Congress Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources.