Loren Kruger
Professor
Department of English
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Germanic Studies
Committee on African Studies
Committee on Cinema and Media Studies
Committee on Theatre and Performance Studies
Office: Walker 405
Phone: (773) 702-7978
lkruger@uchicago.edu
I am a comparatist whose research interests take in several languages and locations. I focus especially on literature and visual culture in South Africa, and drama and performance in English, French, German and Spanish across Africa, the African diaspora, the Americas, and Europe. In addition to books and articles on theatre, I have published research on cinema, television, prose fiction and graphic fiction, as well as translations of research in French and German. I am a contributing editor of Theatre Research International and Scrutiny2 (in South Africa). I am affiliated with the Committees of African Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies as well as the Departments of Comparative Literature and German.
My teaching interests include courses on South African literature and visual culture; Marxist theory and modern culture; cinema in Africa; drama, theatre, image, performance; history and theory of drama; Brecht and beyond; realism, socialism and modernism; catharsis and other aesthetic responses; performance and representation in theatre and theory; translation theory and practice; drama in Africa and the African diaspora; and urban theory and performance.
Courses:
Graduate: Drama, Theatre, Image, Performance; South African Literature and Visual Culture; Marxism and Modern Culture; New Deal Culture: Stage, Screen, and the Public Sphere in 1930s America; Realism, Modernism, Socialism: The Politics of Literary Form; Brechtian Representations: Theatre, Theory, Cinema.
Undergraduate: Cinema in Africa; Brecht and Beyond; Criticism and Ideology; Introduction to Drama; Reading Cultures.
Work in Progress:
A book project entitled Upstart Cities: Literature, Performance and Built Environments in Berlin, Chicago, and Johannesburg.
Selected Publications:
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- Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge, 2004) (winner of the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study 2005)
- The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910 (Routledge, 1999)
- The National Stage (Chicago, 1992)
- “White Cities, Diamond Zulus and the African Contribution to Human Advancement: African Modernities at the World's Fairs” TDR 51 (3) 2007: 19-45
- “Filming the Edgy City: Cinematic Narrative and Urban Form in Post-apartheid Johannesburg” Research in African Literatures 37:2 (2006): 141-63
- "History Plays (in) Britain: Dramas, Nations, and Inventing the Present" in Redefining British Theater History, vol 1: Theorizing Practice, ed. Peter Holland and W.B. Worthen (New York: Palgrave, 2003): 151-76
- "'Black Atlantics,' 'White Indians,' and 'Jews': Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and others," South Atlantic Quarterly 100: 1 (2001 special issue: Atlantic Genealogies): 111-43
- (with Patricia Watson Shariff) "'Shoo--this book makes me to think!': Education, Entertainment, and 'Life-Skills Comics' in South Africa," Poetics Today 22: 2 (2001): 475-513 (South Africa in the Global Imaginary: CELJ prize for best special issue in 2001)
- "Theatre, Crime, and the Edgy City in Post-apartheid Johannesburg," Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 223-52 (special issue: Theatre and the City)
- "Making Sense of Sensation: Enlightenment, Embodiment, and the End(s) of Modern Drama." Modern Drama 43: 4 (2000: special issue: Defining the Field): 543-63
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Jacket illustration: Arthur Molepo as guerrilla
turned banker in Junction Avenue Theatre Company's
Love, Crime and Johannesburg (1999).
Photograph by Ruphin Coudyzer.
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Photograph of Brett Bailey’s play Zombie (1994)
courtesy of the National Arts Foundation,
Grahamstown, South Africa
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Education:
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1986. Teaching at Chicago since 1986.
Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 |
© 2008 The University of Chicago
Last updated: October 2007 |