- Ph.D., University of Vienna

Teresa Kovacs
Assistant Professor, Germanic Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Cultural Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance
Assistant Professor, Germanic Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Cultural Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance
My research focuses on contemporary theater and performance with a specific interest in the politics of aesthetics and theater theory. I engage with the sociopolitical dimension of theater and performance in times of neoliberalism and globalization. Specifically, I am interested in how theater starts a dialogue with the public urban space and how it resonates in a multicultural society.
I studied German literature as well as theater, film and media studies at the University of Vienna. Most recently, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan (funded by the Austrian Science Fund). Before, I held a position at the University of Vienna where I taught in the Department for Theater, Film and Media Studies as well as the German Studies Department.
My first book Drama als Störung. Elfriede Jelineks Konzept des Sekundärdramas [Drama as Disruption: Elfriede Jelinek’s Concept of the Secondary Drama] (2016) focuses on different theoretical approaches to the principle of disruption and deals with the critical and political dimension of this concept as deployed by Nobel-prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek. My second book is interested in contemporary theater and performance’s engagement with destruction and decay. I explore how theater takes up a ruinous practice to reflect on the human condition in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In addition, I’m co-editor of several volumes on theater and performance studies.