Associate Professor Rumya Putcha Receives 2024 Dance Studies Association’s de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award

Photo by Chamberlain Smith, University of Georgia.

The Hugh Hodgson School of Music is excited to share that Rumya Putcha, associate professor of music and women's studies, is this year's recipient of the Dance Studies Association’s de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award for her book The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India.

The de la Torre Bueno First Book Prize® is awarded annually to the best first book in dance studies published in the English language that advances the field of dance studies. Named after José Rollin de la Torre Bueno, the first university press editor to develop a list of titles in dance studies, the de la Torre Bueno Prize has recognized scholarly excellence in the field since 1973.

The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India delves into the cultural, historical, and transnational production of Indian womanhood analyzing the critical role of Indian classical dance. Drawing from extensive archival work, including films, media campaigns, and laws, as well as ethnographic accounts from her own lived experience as a singer and dancer and her family history as the daughter of two Brahmin immigrants, Rumya Putcha grapples with the ways Indian classical dance has served as a mechanism to simultaneously and contradictorily destabilize and reassert the Indian dancer as the quintessential embodiment of heteronormative Indian womanhood onto which imperial, racialized, and casteist fantasies are projected. Putcha develops the notion of “ the dancer’s voice” to assert the woman dancer as an agent of her own collusion with and resistance to dominant forms of nationalism. This book is highly original in its effortless movement between the personal, popular, archival, and ethnographic, and is written from the unique standpoint of a practitioner-theorist. The book insists on the importance of attending to the Global South in dance studies, integrating transnational feminism, South Asian studies, and pop culture. It reads across disciplines, including film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies.