Academic Career & Education

since 2021

PhD student at DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2638 „Normativity, Critique, Change“

September 2023: Visiting Researcher at metaLab, Harvard University, USA 

2018-21

Master of Arts in Theatre studies at FU Berlin

2016 –19

Tutor at the Institute for theatre studies, FU Berlin

2016 –19

Student advisor for the undergraduate program of Theatre studies, Film studies, and Music studies at the Institute for theatre studies, FU Berlin

2012-14

Student assistant in the Collaborative Research Center 626 “Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits”, FU Berlin (subproject B2: “Aesthetic Experience as Experience of Liminality”, Supervision: Prof. Fischer-Lichte) 

2012

Student assistant in the archive of the Institute for theatre studies, FU Berlin 

2010-18

BA in Theatre studies, German philology and Philosophy at FU Berlin

Memberships

• Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (GTW)
• International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR)
• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (DGÄ)
• Gewerkschaft Erziehung & Wissenschaft (GEW)

 

Summer Semester 2025

• BA-seminar: „Desires, Movements, Agencies: Zur Ästhetik der Gruppe The Agency“
  Institute for Theater Studies, Free University Berlin

Winter Semester 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20

• Tutorial accompanying the lecture „Einführung in die Theaterwissenschaft“ by Doris Kolesch
  Institute for Theater Studies, Free University Berlin

Dissertation project:

Enjoy alienation. Productive forms of alienation in Susanne Kennedy’s Women in Trouble and Solastalgia by The Agency

The project searches for an aesthetic vocabulary of alienation against the backdrop of a post-digital diagnosis, which it understands as a contradictory intertwining of tendencies of abstraction and absorption. In this, it articulates a critique of theatrical concepts such as of (co-)presence, participation and appropriation, and opposes these with a semantics of absence, disengagement and asymmetry. In the concept of alienation, the study simultaneously searches for approaches to a model of critique that can once again address contemporary media-political infrastructures: Instead of oppositional, normative critique, it looks for forms of immanent, affirmative critique; instead of strategies of interruption, it looks for strategies of alienation. The study unfolds a panorama of (productive) moments of alienation on the basis of two major performance analyses.

In the first part, it examines the extent to which techniques of masking and playback in Women in Trouble by Susanne Kennedy (2017, Volksbühne Berlin) push the notion of self-present subjectivity to its limits. In a second step, it asks to what extent such withdrawn figures equally alienate from the idea of a theater that competes with other media in co-present liveness. In the second part, the study examines how the performance installation Solastalgia by The Agency (2022, Lothringer Halle Munich) stages an asymmetrical form of aesthetic communication that is more interested in the material's own life than in human participation. In a second step, it asks how this material successively detaches itself from human purposes and prefigures a form of post-anthropocene performance that alienates itself from humans as central focal point of aesthetic experience.

The study tries to reflect the works of Susanne Kennedy and The Agency in the concept of alienation. In this, it seeks a dialogue between contemporary aesthetic positions and discourse elements of the historical critique of alienation. In this dialogue, it attempts to place these contemporary positions in a significant tradition of (aesthetic) critique, while also demonstrating how the concept of alienation must change if it is to remain valid for 21st century theater.

Further research interests:

• New materialist theory

• Postoperaist theory

• Postfordist subjectivity, Theatre and economy

• Late romanticism and Life Reform

Journal articles (peer reviewed)

• “Embracing Homesickness. Human constraints and nonhuman agency in Solastalgia by The Agency.” Theatre and Performance Design 10/3 (2024), pp. 211-228. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322551.2024.2402598 (Open Access)

Journal articles

• „Entfremdung als Kategorie für ein Theater des 21. Jahrhunderts.” Thewis 12/1 (2025) (accepted).

Articles in anthologies

• together with Hannah Schünemann: „Kritiklose Künstlichkeit – künstliche Kritik. Susanne Kennedys materialistische Techniken der Selbstentfremdung“. In: Doris Kolesch, Jan Lazardzig, Jenny Schrödl, Lisa-Frederike Seidler, Matthias Warstat, Thore Walch (eds.), Matters of Urgency. Herausforderungen der Gegenwart in Theater und Wissenschaft.Berlin: Berlin Universities Publishing 2025, pp. 200-214. https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-22414 (Open Access)

• „‚Am Anfang‘. Die Kritik und ihre Aporien, der Tod und seine Abschaffung am Beispiel Valeska Gerts.“ In: Olivia Ebert, Eva Holling, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Philipp Schulte, Bernhard Siebert, Gerald Siegmund (eds.): Theater als Kritik. Theorie, Geschichte und Praktiken der Ent-Unterwerfung. Bielefeld: Transcript 2018, pp. 437-446. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839444528-043

Smaller works

• „Forever Déja-Vu.“In: Jamila Arenz, Veronika Darian, Jessica Hölzl (eds.), RE/VERSIONEN. Künstlerische und wissenschaftliche Verfahren der Un/Eindeutigkeit. Berlin: Neofelis 2024, pp. 71-74. https://doi.org/10.52007/9783958084971 (Open Access)

• „Zwischen letzten Gründen liegen. Gedanken zu Parzelle 62 von Barbara Lenartz.“ In: Barbara Lenartz (ed.), Katalog zu Parzelle 62. Berlin 2020, S. 9.

Talks and presentations (selection)

• „Annäherungen an einen theatralen Begriff von Entfremdung.“ Workshop „Desires, Movement, Agencies. Zu Ästhetik und Arbeit der Gruppe The Agency”, organized by Yana Prinsloo and Felix Stenger, Free University Berlin, 21.02.2025.

• „Entfremdung als Kategorie für ein Theater des 21. Jahrhunderts.“ Workshop „Re/Lektüren. Strategien des Wieder- & Widerlesens in der Theaterwissenschaft“, organized by Adam Czirak and Theresa Eisele, University of Vienna, 10.01.2025.

• „Offene Grenzen. Zur Re-Hermetisierung in The Agencys Solastalgia.“ 16th congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft „Offene Räume“, University Leipzig, 13.06.2024.

• “Old materialism, flushed through performance art, equals new materialism?” metaLab colloquium, Harvard University, 14.09.2023.

• gemeinsam mit Hannah Schünemann: „Kritische Nähe – subjektlose Kritik: Perspektiven mit Brecht auf Techniken des Gegenwartstheaters.“ 17th symposium of the International Brecht Society “Brecht in Dark Times”, University of Tel Aviv, 12.12.2022.

• „Über die Wünschbarkeit einer Praxis der immersiven Einsamkeit (Theresa Reiwer: Social Capsule).“ Conference by Junge Deutsche Schillergesellschaft „(Literarische) Einsamkeitsreflexionen“, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, 03.11.2022.

• together with mit Hannah Schünemann: „Kritik durch Nähe: Perspektiven mit Brecht auf Techniken des Gegenwartstheaters.“ 15th congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft „Matters of Urgency“, Free University Berlin, 30.09.2022.

• „Enjoy alienation oder: Das Installative als Grenze der Aneignung.“ Gathering „Körper im Ausstellungsraum“ on the occasion of the exhibition Nurturael by The Agency, organized by Luzi Gross and Lisa Paland, Lothringer 13 Halle München, 08.07.2022.

• together with Kai van Eikels: „Tanz und Arbeit.“ Lecture series „Perspektiven der Tanzwissenschaft“, organized by Gabriele Brandstetter, Institute for Theater Studies, Free University Berlin, 23.11.2016.

• „‘Am Anfang.‘ Aporien der Kritik im Angesicht des Todes am Beispiel Valeska Gerts Tanz Tod.“ 13th congress of the Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft „Theater als Kritik“, Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, 06.11.2016.