Loren Kruger

Multilingual as well as interdisciplinary, Loren Kruger’s research includes The National Stage (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on theatre in England, France and America but is cited by researchers from India to Ireland, Croatia to China, South Africa to Sweden;  Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge University Press), which won the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study awarded by the Modern Language Association; A Century of South African Theatre (Bloomsbury), and Imagining the Edgy City (Oxford University Press). The latter covers film and fiction, public art and architecture as well as performance of poetry and theatre in Johannesburg “the Chicago of South Africa,” and compares Johannesburg with other cities from Chicago to Paris, Berlin to Bogotá, Sydney to São Paolo. Kruger’s most recent publications return to Chicago: she was commissioned to introduce Six Plays by Mickle Maher (Agate Publishing 2022) and to write about theatre in Chicago and elsewhere for the 75^th anniversary issue of Theatre Journal (2023), a journal that she edited in the 1990s. Her edition and translation of Beyond the Internationale: Revolutionary Writings by Eugène Pottier, Communard (2024) is published by Charles H. Kerr, the progressive publishing house operating in Chicago since 1886, which printed Pottier’s most famous song, the Internationale for the first time in English translation in 1894.

Future research and writing projects include a chapter on the Internationale for a collection on Red World Literature (Routledge Handbook series), essays on theatre and politics in Europe and South Africa, and memoirs of family members whose lives crossed two or three continents over the course of the twentieth century

Books

• Beyond the Internationale: Revolutionary Writing by Eugène Pottier, Communard. Edited and translated by Loren Kruger (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2024)
• A Century of South African Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2019)
• Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg (Oxford, 2013)
• 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)

Articles—a sample since 2012

• ·       Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry and African America in Lewis Nkosi’s    Drama, Research in African Literatures 54, no. 1 (2024): 1-17
•         Theatre and Capital Once Again, Theatre Journal 75: 4 (2023: 75^th anniversary issue): 389-97
• ·       Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South, UNITAS 95: 2 (2022: centennial issue), 114-35
•          Performance, Politics, and Historiography in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune, PAMIETNIK TEATRALNY vol. 70 no. 4 (2021: special issue) 
•          Introduction to: SIX PLAYS BY MICKLE MAHER (Evanston, IL: Agate Publishing, 2022)
•          Performance and politics in a time of confinement—virtual stages between South Africa and African America, Critical Stages no. 23--special issue on Performance and Politics (2021)
•          Glocal South Sides: Race, Capital, and Performing against injustice in Chicago and Johannesburg, Theatre Journal: special issue on the Global South 72 (2020): 469-85
• White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native Maps in Richard Wright's Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe's Johannesburg, Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2018): 29-47.
• Brecht: Our Contemporary? (Un)timely translation and the politics of transmission, Theatre Journal 68, no.2 (2016):299-309
• Dispossession and Solidarity in Athol Fugard and Juan Radrigán, Theatre Research International 40, no.3 (2015): 314-31
• Cape Town and the Sustainable City in the Writing of Henrietta Rose-Innes, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2:1-2 (2015), 15-33
• Tedium: An Essay on Drag, Attunement, Theatre and Translation. Comparative Drama, 48, no.4 (2014): 393-413
• The Drama of Hospitality: performance, migration and urban renewal in Johannesburg Performance and the City: Global Stages. Ed Kim Solga and DJ Hopkins (New York: Palgrave 2013): 19-39.
•  “On The Tragedy of the Commoner,” Comparative Drama 46, no.3 (2012): 355-76 (winner of the Philadelphia Constantinidis Prize for dramatic theory and the Greek inheritance.)
• What Time Is This Place? Continuity and Conflict in Urban Performance Sites: Lessons from Haymarket Square.” In The Politics of Space, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz (London: Routledge 2012): 46-65