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  • PROFESSORS

PROFESSORS

bjakov@stanford.edu | (650) 723-3512 | roble gym room 105
Branislav Jakovljevic
Associate Professor and Department Chair. Avant-garde and Experimental Theater, Performance Theory, Performance and Politics. Branislav Jakovljevic is the author of Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945-1991 (University of Michigan Press 2016), winner of ATHE Outstanding Book Award, and, most recently, Frozen Donkey and Other Essays (Smrznuti magarac i drugi eseji, Links, Belgrade 2017). His first book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009.
Jakovljevic (pronounced Ya-kov-le-vich) publishes widely on subjects ranging from history of modernist theater, to experimental performance, to avant-garde and conceptual art, to contemporary performance. His articles appeared in leading scholarly journals in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Theater) and in Europe (Serbia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Croatia, Poland, and Belgium). In 2013 he chaired 19th annual Performance Studies international conference "Now Then: Performance and Temporality" at Stanford University.
jbrody1@stanford.edu | (650) 725-9109 | roble gym room 107
Jennifer Brody
Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and Chair of CCSRE; Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Race Theory, Performance Studies. Jennifer DeVere Brody was educated at Vassar College, Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania. She held the Weinberg College Professorship at Northwestern University and, before coming to Stanford, taught in English, African American Studies, Gender Studies and Theater at many schools including UC-Riverside and Duke University. Her research has been supported by the Royal Society for Theatre Research in Great Britain, the Ford and Mellon Foundations and she won the Monette-Horwitz Prize for Independent Research Combatting Homophobia. Her books, both published by Duke University Press, include Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (2008). She teaches classes on race and theatre in the US and Britain from 1800 to the present, feminist and queer theory, food studies, and film. She has served as the President of the Women and Theater Association, on the board of Women and Performance, and her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals from Signs to Callaloo, Theater Journal and TDR. She has an edited book on James Baldwin forthcoming and she is working on a new book on sculpture and performance. She Chaired the TAPS Department from 2012-15 and in 2016 will direct the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity.
helam@stanford.edu | (650) 725-3964 | sweet hall room 428
Harry Elam, Jr.
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education; Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities; Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education; Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities and the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is author of and editor of seven books, Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Winner of the 2005 Errol Hill Award from the American Society of Theatre Research); and co‑editor of four books, African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader; Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama; The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium; and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly as well as journals in Israel, Taiwan and Poland and several critical anthologies. Professor Elam is also the former editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial boards of Atlantic Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Modern Drama. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in April 2006. In August 2006 he won the Betty Jean Jones Outstanding Teaching Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society and in November 2006 he won the Distinguished Scholar Award form the American Society of Theatre Research. In July 2014, Elam received the Association of Theatre in Higher education’s highest award for theatre scholars, the Career Achievement Award. In addition to his scholarly work, he has directed professionally for over twenty years: most notably, he directed Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto California, he directed Jar the Floor by Cheryl West and Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleague, which was nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and was the winner of DramaLogue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He has directed several of August Wilson's plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences, the latter of which won eight Bay Area “Choice” Awards. At Stanford he has been awarded five different teaching awards: The ASSU Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Small Classes (1992); the Humanities and Sciences Deans Distinguished Teaching Award (1993); the Black Community Service Center Outstanding Teacher Award (1994), The Bing Teaching Fellowship for Undergraduate Teaching (1994-1997); The Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching (1998). He received his AB from Harvard College in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Dramatic Arts from the University of California Berkeley in 1984.
lkhill@stanford.edu | (650) 725-3494 | Roble Hall Room 142
Leslie Hill
Associate Professor, Performance Making; Theater-Making Concentration Advisor. Leslie Hill teaches courses in Performance Making, Directing & Dramaturgy, Arts Activism and British Theatre. She is co-director of Curious theatre company (www.placelessness.com). Her interests include Live Art, Applied Theatre, arts activism, British Theatre, immersive theatre, and science-art collaborations.

Her performance work with Curious, produced by Artsadmin in London, has been shown in 18 countries, commissioned and produced by organizations such as Artist Links Shanghai, Franklin Furnace, PS122, the RSC, the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, Carriageworks Sydney, Sydney Opera House, Tanzquartier Vienna, Alfred ve dvoře Prague, the Old Power Station, Ljubljana, Le Couvent des Recollets Paris, Centre Pompidou and the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Her new book Sex, Suffrage and the Stage: Early Feminism in British Theatre is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. She is co-author of Performing Proximity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and co-editor of Performance and Place (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and New Theatre Quarterly. Originally from New Mexico, Hill lived in the UK for 20 years where she co-founded Curious theatre company with Helen Paris in 1996. Hill received a double major in English and Philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 1989, an MA from the Shakespeare Institute in 1991, and a Ph.D in Theatre from the University of Glasgow in 1996.

dlooser@stanford.edu | Roble Hall Room 141
Diana Looser
Assistant Professor; Director of Undergraduate Studies. Diana Looser’s research interests lie in the following areas: Historiographic approaches to performance; Ethnographic approaches to performance; Postcolonial, transnational, and intercultural performance; Performance from the Pacific Islands region (Oceania). Diana’s primary research examines theatre and related modes of performance as ways to explore aesthetic, social, political, and historical concerns throughout the broader Pacific Islands region, placing in dialogue works from various geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary domains. She researches contemporary Pacific Islands performance that has flourished throughout the region since the 1960s, as well as historical performance in Oceania with a concentration on the ethnographic and artistic interface between western and indigenous representations of the Pacific from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Her first monograph, Remaking Pacific Pasts: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), won the ADSA Rob Jordan Prize in 2016. Her current book project, Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific, examines the international connections forged by artistic performances from Oceania in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Diana’s essays have appeared in edited collections and in periodicals such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Research International, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, and The Contemporary Pacific, and she is the Book Review Editor for Modern Drama.
jmenon@stanford.edu | (650) 723-2682 | Roble Gym Room 143
Jisha Menon
Associate Professor, Postcolonial Theory and Performance Studies. Jisha Menon teaches courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory and performance studies. She received her M.A. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and her Ph.D in Drama from Stanford University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence in South Asia, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. She is co-editor, with Patrick Anderson, of a volume of essays, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) that explores the coimbrication of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces. Her book, Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), considers the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while also paying attention to the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also at work on a second project, Pedestrian Acts: Performing the City in Neoliberal India, which considers new narrations of selfhood that are produced at the intersection of neoliberal state, global market and consumer fantasy.
hparis@stanford.edu | (650) 725-3494 | Roble Gym Room 142
Helen Paris
Associate Professor, Performance Making. Helen Paris is an Associate Professor, Performance Making and award-winning artist who has been making performance work for twenty-five years. Her research interests include: Live Art, solo performance, autobiography, intimacy and proximity in performance, site specific performance, the senses in performance and audience / performer relationships. She received her doctorate from the University of Surrey in 2000, exploring notions of the virtual and the visceral in live performance. Her writing has appeared in books and journals including Performance Research, Women and Performance, Total Theatre, Theatre/Public and Tessera. Her recent book, is entitled Performing Proximity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (2014).

Paris is artistic director of Curious theatre company. Her solo performances include Family Hold Back, which has toured extensively in the UK, and internationally, including Sydney Opera House, Guling Street Avant-Garde Theater in Taipei and the Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts, Shanghai. With her company Curious, she has produced over 40 projects in a range of media including live performance, installation and film. The company’s work has been presented and supported by events and institutions including: London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, the British Council Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival; international conferences such as IETM, PSi and ATHE; and film festivals such as Winterthur, the London Short Film Festival and Hors Pistes at the Pompidou Center. Curious is produced and managed by Artsadmin, London. (www.placelessness.com)

pphelan@stanford.edu | (650) 725-7017 | Roble Gym Room 103A
Peggy Phelan
Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts; Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English; Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Peggy Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005). She has written more than sixty articles and essays in scholarly, artistic, and commercial magazines ranging from Artforum to Signs. She has written about Samuel Beckett for the PMLA and for The National Gallery of Ireland. She has also written about Robert Frost, Michael and Paris Jackson, Olran, Marina Abramovic, Dziga Vertov and a wide range of artists working in photography, dance, architecture, film, video, music, and poetry.  She has edited special issues of the journals Narrative and Women and Performance. She has been a fellow of the Humanities Institute, University of California, Irvine; and a fellow of the Humanities Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal, one of three quarterly publications of the College Art Association, and as Chair of the board. She has been President and Treasurer of Performance Studies International, the primary professional organization in her field. She has been a fellow of the Getty Research Institute and the Stanford Humanities Center. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004. She chaired the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and the Drama Department at Stanford University.
mrehm@stanford.edu | (650) 723-0485 | Memorial Hall Room 208
Rush Rehm
Professor, classical drama. An actor, director, and professor of Theater & Performance Studies and Classics, Rush Rehm publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. He also serves as Artistic Director of Stanford Repertory Theater (SRT). In its 18th year, SRT is a professional company that presents plays on campus and on tour internationally during the academic year, and also produces a summer festival based on a major playwright or theme. The festival includes a main stage and second-stage production, a film series, a Continuing Studies course, and a community symposium based on a major playwright each summer. Rehm’s books include Aeschylus’ Oresteia: A Theatre Version (Melbourne 1978); Greek Tragic Theatre (Routledge: London 1992, paper 1994, modern Greek translation 1999; a new edition entitled Understanding Greek Tragedy due out in 2016); Marriage to Death: The Conflation of Marriage and Funeral Rituals in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 1994, paper 1996); The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy (Princeton 2002); and Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World (Duckworth: London 2003). Recent contributions to edited volumes include The Brill Companion to Euripides, The Brill Companion to Sophocles, The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge), Rebel Women (Methuen: London), Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in Performance (Oxford), Sophocles and the Greek Language (Brill: Leiden), Antigone’s Answer (Atlanta), and Post-Colonial Classics (Oxford). As well as courses on ancient theater and culture, Rehm teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism.
jross@stanford.edu | (650) 725-0735 | Roble Gym Room 109
Janice Ross
Dance studies, dance history, dance in prisons. Janice Ross is a Professor in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies and former Faculty Director of ITALIC, Immersion In The Arts Living In Culture, freshman residential program. Former director of the Dance Division, she has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. She teaches classes in Dance Studies, Dance History, Dance in Prison and Performance and Prisons. She is the author of four books including Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2015). Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance, (University of California Press 2007), winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007) and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education, (University of Wisconsin 2001). Her essays on dance have been published in numerous anthologies including On Stage Alone, ed. Claudia Gittleman, (Univ. of Florida Press, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, ed. by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counter-culture and the Avant-Garde, Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, Jacobs' Pillow Research Fellowship, New York University Center for Ballet and the Arts 2018-19 Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars and past President of the Dance Critics Association and a former delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies.
mwsmith1@stanford.edu | Bldg 260-204
Matthew Wilson Smith
Director of Graduate Studies; Professor; Associate Professor, Theater & Performance Studies and German ( B.A. Brown University, 1993; M.A. University of Chicago, 1995; M.A., Ph.D. Columbia University 2002). Matthew Wilson Smith's interests include modern theatre; modernism and media; and relations between technology, science, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre explores historical intersections between the performing arts and the neurological sciences and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of modern artistic synthesis, placing such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a genealogy of totalizing performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2016. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).

EMERITUS PROFESSORS

aposto@stanford.edu
Jean-Marie Apostolides
Professor Emeritus, Classical and Contemporary French Theater. Jean-Marie Apostolidès has been teaching at TAPS from 1993 to 2015. As a playwright, his texts have been produced in France, Canada, and the United States. Over the last fifteen years, he has staged a dozen plays at Stanford and in the Bay Area, both classical and contemporary, particularly from the European repertoire. In his productions, he has focused on the notion of mise-en-tableaux, which complements the traditional techniques of mise-en-scène with silent tableaux aimed at visually translating the unconscious of the text analyzed from a theoretical perspective. Among his books are: Le roi-machine (1981), La nauf des fous (1982), Les métamorphoses de Tintin (1984/2003/2006), Le Prince sacrifié (1985), L'affaire Unabomber (1996), Les tombeaux de Guy Debord (1999/2006) L'audience (2001), Traces, revers, écart (2001), Héroïsme et victimisation (2003/2008), Sade in the Abyss (2003), Tintin et le mythe du surenfant (2003), Cyrano, qui fut tout et qui ne fut rien (2006), Il faut construire l'hacienda (2006), Ivan Chtcheglov, profil perdu (2006), Dans la peau de Tintin (2010), Buvons, buvons et moquons-nous du reste (2011), Konoshiko (2012), Trois solitudes : D.A.F. de Sade, Marie Lafarge, Josefa Menéndez (2012), L'Execution du testament de Sade (2014), Debord le naufrageur (2015).
eddelman@stanford.edu
William Eddelman
Associate Professor Emeritus, theater design and history. William Eddelman is an Associate Professor Emeritus at Stanford TAPS. He received MA and PhD degrees from Stanford in Theatre History and Design, and completed his dissertation research on the development of landscape on the 17th and 18th century Italian opera stages with a United States Fulbright Scholarship at the Theatre Institute of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy. He was also a member of the Master Classes, sponsored by Friedelind Wagner, at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany in 1965. During his teaching career at Stanford, he combined the artistic and the academic teaching classes in theater history, art history, musical theater, cultural history, theater aesthetics, costume and scenic design, dramatic literature, theater and politics, and the psychology of clothes (“Mapping and Wrapping the Body”). He taught several times at the Stanford Center in Berlin, focusing on the culture of the Weimar Period, contemporary German drama and German modernity. He has taught seventeen various classes for the Continuing Studies program at Stanford, participated in several Stanford Summer Theatre symposiums, and has led travel study tours to Northern Italy with an emphasis on Palladian villas and Venice with a focus on Venetian Carnivals for the Stanford Alumni Association. In addition to designing sets and costumes for numerous Stanford productions, he has also designed for professional companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. These productions have included operas, dramas, musicals and experimental texts. He has taught various classes at two fashion institutes in San Francisco, and delivered lectures and presentations for a variety of local cultural organizations and institutions. During his first Stanford sabbatical in 1977-78 he was in Europe for 10 months and saw 135 theatrical productions in fourteen cities from Moscow to London at a time when the great European theatre companies were at their peak. This exposure served as an intellectual and artistic educational background beyond the world of academia and gave him the opportunity to develop his expertise in international theater design. Being a specialist in international theatrical design, Professor Eddelman established the Theatrical Design Collection at the Museum of Performance and Design (MPD) in San Francisco and while on the board of MPD gave lectures and curated exhibits. He is currently on the board of the Achenbach Foundation at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and is involved in building a research library and design collection in International Theatre Design for the Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He is teaching classes at the Fromm Institute in San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies and is preparing future lectures on such subjects as design interpretations of Wagner’s “Ring," “The Eighteenth Century Grand Tour: From London to Naples” and “Incognito: Unmasking Venetian Carnivals.”
mram@stanford.edu
Michael Ramsaur
Professor Emeritus, Lighting Design. Michael Ramsaur served Stanford for over 40 years as Director of Production and Professor of Lighting Design. In addition to his teaching responsibilities for the Department of Theater and Performance Studies he is a Guest Professor at Novi Sad University, Novi Sad Serbia and an Honorary Professor at the Central Academy of Drama, Beijing in addition to giving lectures and lighting design workshops in over 20 countries. He has served eight years as the Chair of the Education Commission of the International Organization of Scenographers, Theatre Architects, and Technicians (OSTAT) and as President of OISTAT. He is a long time member of United States Institute for Theater Technology (USITT) and Fellow of Institute (USITT). He is also a member of the United Scenic Artist Association (USAA) Local 829 (Lighting Design), the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 16, the Illumination Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), the International Association of Lighting Designers (IALD), the British Association of Lighting Designers (ALD), the Taiwan Association of Theater Technicians (TATT), and the German Theater Theater Association (DTHG). He has had a 40 year career in theater including serving as a lighting designer for many theater companies internationally and locally. Examples of his designs have been exhibited at two United States Institute for Theater Technology Design Expositions, a theater design exhibit at the Triton Museum San Jose and at theatrical design exhibitions in Prague and Shanghai. He has been awarded Outstanding Lighting Design awards from the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Association, Dean Goodman Award, and Drama Logue Award as well as receiving a Fulbright grant.
rayner@stanford.edu
Alice Rayner
Professor, critical theory and dramatic literature. Alice Rayner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature and theory. Her research interests include the phenomenology of theater as well as comedy, genre theory, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and hermeneutics in the analysis of texts and performance. Published books include Comic Persuasion (University of California Press), To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (University of Michigan Press) and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomenon of Theatre (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Her essays on technology and culture have been included in Discourse as well as in Michal Kobialka’s book, Of Borders and Thresholds, and Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’ Landscape and Theatre. She has written on Harold Pinter for Theatre Journal as well as the collection Harold Pinter at 60 (ed. Katherine Burkman, Indiana). Three essays on Suzan-Lori Parks, co-authored with Harry Elam, have appeared in Theatre Journal as well as in Performing America (ed. Jeffrey Mason and J. Ellen Gainor) and Staging Resistence (ed. Jeanne Colleran and Jenny Spencer). Also published in Theatre Journal is “Rude Mechanicals and The Specters of Marx,” a theory of practical labor in theater. Other essays include a study of metaphor and performance in Études Théâtrales/Essays in Theatre; on Stanislavksy and A.C. Bradley in Theatre Quarterly, “The Audience...and the Ethics of Listening,” an examination of the responsibilities of an audience; “Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology,” a theory of action derived from Hamlet (both in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism); and “All Her Children: Caryl Churchill’s Furious Ghosts,” a study of the unborn in Churchill’s plays (in Sheila Rabillard’s Essays on Churchill). Her article on stage objects in relation to Heidegger’s essay, The Thing, appears in the collection, Staging Philosophy, (ed. David Krasner and David Saltz, Michigan, 2006). She is on the editorial boards of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Theatre Journal. From 1996-99 she was Director of Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Department Chair from 2002-2005.
Carl Weber
Professor Emeritus, directing and dramaturgy. Carl Weber, Professor of Directing and Dramaturgy at Stanford, began his career as an actor with the Heidelberg City Theater while completing a B.A. in Philosophy, German, and English Literature at Heidelberg University. In 1949, he was one of the founders of the Heidelberg Zimmertheater and directed the company’s opening production. He moved to Berlin in 1950, joining the company of Theater der Freundschaft, and was invited, in 1952, to join the Berliner Ensemble as an actor, dramaturg, and assistant director to Bertolt Brecht, with whom he worked on the productions of Katzgraben, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Galileo.

After Brecht’s death in 1956, Weber became one of the directors with the company. He co-wrote and directed, with Peter Palitzsch, the play The Day of the Great Scholar Wu, staged a revival of Brecht’s production of Mother Courage, and was one of the directors of Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. He also wrote and edited program brochures and acted in eight of the Ensemble’s productions. 1955-61, Weber directed as well for other theaters, such as Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, and for television (Deutscher Fernsehfunk).

In 1961, Weber staged the West German premiere of Brecht’s Trumpets and Drums at the Lübeck City Theater, and was invited to direct Brecht’s Puntila and his Man Matti at Carnegie Institute of Technology, at Pittsburgh, in 1962. Between 1962 and 1966, he directed at theaters in West Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States, among them the San Francisco’s Actors Workshop, Memphis’ Front St. Theatre, Norway’s National Theatre in Oslo, Denmark’s Aarhus and Aalborg Theatres, and Berlin’s Schaubühne. He also served 1964-66 as principal resident director of Wuppertaler Bühnen, the home of Pina Bausch’s “Tanztheater.”

Weber moved to New York in 1966 when he was appointed Master-Teacher of Directing and Acting at the newly-founded NYU School of the Arts. Subsequently he directed numerous productions in New York and at American regional theatres, such as Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre; Chelsea Theatre Center at B.A.M.; American Place Theatre; Perry St. Theatre; the Martinique; Arena Stage, Washington, D.C.; Yale Repertory Theatre; McCarter Theatre, Princeton; and San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Among his productions, besides Brecht plays, were the American premieres of Peter Handke’s Kaspar (the production received two Obies), The Ride Across Lake Constance, and They are Dying Out; of Witkiewicz’s The Waterhen; and the premieres of Ed Bullins’ Jo Anne; W. D. Snodgrass’s Fuehrer Bunker; Mac Wellman’s Starluster and Saul Levitt’s Lincoln. He also directed many classics, among them Molière’s The Miser, Rostand’s Cyrano, H.V. Kleist’s The Broken Pitcher; and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. While based in New York, he continued to direct in Europe: for Zürich Schauspielhaus; München Kammerspiele; Hamburg Schauspielhaus, and Wuppertaler Bühnen. He also staged one of the first Indian Brecht productions, Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1968, at the Asian Theatre Institute, New Delhi. From 1971 to 1983, he chaired the Graduate Directing Department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1984, he was appointed Professor of Drama (now Theater & Performance Studies) at Stanford University where he heads Ph.D. Directing Studies. He has directed and/or taught at Columbia University, the National Theatre School of Canada at Montreal, U.C.L.A., Princeton University, Temple University, and Justus von Liebing Universität at Giessen. He also lectured and/or conducted workshops at many other American and German universities.

Weber has authored and narrated programs on Brecht and Handke for Camera 3, CBS-TV. His writings have been published in The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre Journal, Theater, Theatre Three, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theater Heute, Theater der Zeit, Die Weltbühne, and others. His essays have appeared in the volumes The Director in a Changing Theatre, Master Teachers of Theatre, Szenische Geschichtsdarstellung, Theatre and Film in Exile, Multiculturalism and Performance, Vom Wort zum Bild, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Brecht Unbound, A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion, American Dramaturgy, An Introduction to Theatre, Brecht Handbuch, Heiner Müller Handbuch, and Encyclopedia of the 20th Century, among others. He is a co-editor of the Yearbook of the International Brecht Society and of Performing Arts Journal.

Weber translated, edited, and wrote introductions and commentary to four volumes of plays, poetry and prose by Heiner Müller: Hamletmachine, Explosion of a Memory, The Battle, and A Heiner Müller Reader, published by PAJ Publications and Johns Hopkins University Press. He also edited the anthology Dramacontemporary: Germany, Johns Hopkins University Press, for which he wrote introductions and translated several of the plays. His translations of Müller, Manfred Karge, and Gerlind Reinshagen have been widely performed. His translations into German of plays from the English, French, and Russian repertoire were produced at German theaters and radio.

Weber is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, and was on its Board, 1980-1986. He is also a member of PEN Club, ATHE, and the International Brecht Society.