Neil Verma, PhD ’08 and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the College, won the Best First Book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for A Theatre of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The award offers a cash prize in recognition of the best first book published in film and media studies.

A Theatre of the Mind expands on Verma’s dissertation research on the “Golden Age” of radio drama, analyzing more than 6000 radio recordings from the Great Depression to the Cold War to trace the development of the radio drama genre and its place in American culture.