Cornell Music & Sound Studies Ph.D. Candidate Nic Vigilante has won the 2025 Marvin Carlson Award for Best Student Essay for Theatre or Performance for their essay “Salty, Sweet, and Spicy: Ingestion and Immersion in Queer Asian American Nightlife.”
“This essay examines the aesthetics, politics, and cultural logics underpinning queer Asian American nightlife in urban Los Angeles since 2022,” said Vigilante. “One of the most important characteristics of this scene is the ubiquity of food – from rituals of communal cooking and eating, to drag performers handing out and dressing up as food. Cultural practices surrounding food are always fundamentally social, and in this moment of emergence from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic ingesting food (both literally and metaphorically) became a key method for managing the porosity of the body and ingesting the social into the individual. Parallel to this, discourses of immersion drive event organizing in this scene (such as the idea of "losing yourself on the dancefloor"); immersion here functions as the corollary to ingestion, where the individual is subsumed into the social collective. Drawing on performance studies, queer of color theory, and critical food studies, I argue that it is in the interplay between these two core logics – ingestion and immersion – that the aesthetics of queer Asian American performance arise in contemporary Los Angeles.
“This essay was presented at the November 2024 annual meeting of the American Studies Association in Baltimore, where it was awarded an honorable mention for the Gene Wise-Warren Susman Prize for the best paper presented by a graduate student at the meeting.
“While, on paper, my PhD work is in Music & Sound Studies here at Cornell, PMA has always been a kind of second home for me both professionally and personally,” Vigilante continued. “The first graduate seminar I took at Cornell was Professor Karen Jaime's PMA 6611: Minoritarian Aesthetics, and it was in that (Covid-era Zoom) classroom that I began thinking about myself as a researcher while making some of the most enduring friendships and collaborative partnerships that I have ever had. Receiving this award feels like the culmination of countless hours with PMA professors and graduate students in the seminar room, around the advising table, in working groups, at conferences, and – of course – at performances in Ithaca and beyond. After learning with and from my PMA colleagues for the last five years, I am very excited to receive this award that would not have been possible without the friendship and guidance of too many people to name here.”
The Marvin Carlson Award honors CUNY Professor Marvin Carlson (CU PhD '61) and consists of a cash prize ($250) and certificate.
This year's Marvin Carlson Award committee included Professor Bruce Levitt (PMA), Associate Professor Philip Lorenz (Literatures in English), and Professor J. Ellen Gainor (PMA) as the committee chair.
Marvin Carlson is a Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CUNY, Comparative Literature, Theater and Performance, Middle Eastern Studies, and Global Early Modern Studies. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016).
Read more about Vigilante’s work.
