Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

By: Danielle Coty-Fattal | Date: March 6, 2026 | Tags: Tobin Siebers Prize, award

The University of Michigan Press is pleased to announce that Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in Musical Theatre, by Samuel Yates, has been chosen for the 2025 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. This is the final prize for the best-proposed book-length manuscript on a topic of pressing urgency in the field.

Samuel Yates Ph.D., is a deaf scholar-artist who examines disability aesthetics and labor in performance literatures and media. Samuel is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre at The Pennsylvania State University. Their writing on topics such as disability aesthetics, the triple-threat as an economic unit for Broadway musicals, accessibility practices, and pedagogy is published or forthcoming in journals like The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Theatre Topics, as well as many edited volumes, such as The Matter of Disability (Michigan), Critical University Studies and Performance (Vanderbilt), and This is a Place We Made: Disability History and Public Land (University of Illinois). Samuel’s forthcoming textbook with Jeanmarie Higgins (UT-Arlington), Teaching Writing Across Theatre and Performance Studies: A Resource Guide, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. As a dramaturg and accessibility consultant, Yates has collaborated with theaters such as the Abbey Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Gala Hispanic Theatre, and Great Plains Theatre Commons.

David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, series editors of Corporealities: Discourses of Disability at the University of Michigan Press, wrote, “Yates’s formulation of a hyper capacitation of bodies (the triple threat) exposes the degree to which theatrical casting relies on the suppression of disability. In this space of erasure, the author shows how a disability analysis productively exposes the industry’s illusory desire to fetishize ability while relying on the difference that disability makes.” Mitchell was Yates’s dissertation advisor, and we’re pleased to see their working relationship continue with the publication of Yates’ book in the series.

About the Book

Cripping Broadway: Producing Disability in the American Musical concerns disability aesthetics and accessibility practices in Broadway musicals, and asks how our notions of disability and the able body inform and transform theatrical performance. Intervening in musical theatre studies, literary disability studies, and performance, Yates insists that disability is not a thematic afterthought but a structuring condition of the form itself. Through archival research, interviews, and performance analysis, Cripping Broadway uncovers how production practices, aesthetic conventions, and audience expectations collectively sustain a fantasy of limitless capacity in commercial theatre. In doing so, Yates offers a new framework for understanding the politics of disability performance in the twenty-first century. Research behind Cripping Broadway has been supported by the American Theatre and Drama Society, an ASTR Grant for Researchers with Heavy Teaching Loads, and, most recently, the inaugural Bunnett-Muir Musical Theatre Research Fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities

The work of the late University of Michigan faculty member, Tobin Siebers, has influenced Disability Studies in field-shifting ways since the publication of his prize-winning essay “My Withered Limb” in 1998. His subsequent scholarly publications, including the books Disability Theory (2008) and Disability Aesthetics (2010) as well as essays such as “A Sexual Culture for Disabled People” (2012), quickly became pivotal works in the field. Siebers’s work has galvanized new scholarship in relation to questions of representation, subjectivity, and the entry of non-normative bodies into public space, and made the study of disability a central component (alongside gender, race, sexuality, and class) in analyses of the culture wars and identity studies.

To honor this remarkable legacy, the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature established The Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Reflecting the scholar’s work the prize commemorates, the competition has invited submissions on a wide range of topics, from literary and cultural studies, to trans-historical research, to contributions to disability theory such as work in crip/queer studies.

The goal of establishing the prize was to stimulate the field of disability studies and also ensure that U-M Press maintained its leading edge in this emerging area. After 10 years, we feel that the field is thriving and this list has become not only well established but is informing so many other aspects of our publishing work. As we move to the next decade, we remain extremely committed to the legacy of Tobin Siebers and the field of disability studies, as seen through a humanistic lens. A big thank you to the authors, series editors, and the family of Dr. Siebers, and here’s to an exciting next step together.

Previous Winners: