Prof. Michal Kobialka Releases New Book
University of Minnesota Theatre Arts & Dance extends a congratulations to our very own Michal Kobialka on the release of his newest book Staging Difficult Pasts, eds. Maria M. Delgado, Michal Kobialka, Bryce Lease! Michal has also been awarded Honorable Mention in The Polish Institute Of Arts And Sciences Of America's Anna M. Cienciala Award for best edited multi-author volume for A History of Polish Theatre, eds. Katarzyna Fazan, Michal Kobialka, Bryce Lease.
Please join us in congratulating Michal and his collaborators. Well done!
Transnational Memory, Theatres and Museums brings together a series of essays looking at how contemporary theatre makers and museum curators are staging historical narratives, curating objects, and performing memory cultures. Examining theatre and museum practices in Hungary, Poland, India, Argentina, Spain, South Africa, Colombia, Lebanon, Chile, the United States, and the United Kingdom, these essays offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts; as well as draw attention to how these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism could expand our understanding of difficult pasts in transnational cultural contexts.
To learn more about the Staging Difficult Pasts project click here. The edited collection is available as open access.
Poland is celebrated internationally for its rich and varied performance traditions and theatre histories. This groundbreaking volume is the first in English to engage with these topics across an ambitious scope, incorporating Staropolska, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Enlightenment and Romanticism within its broad ambit. The book also discusses theatre cultures under socialism, the emergence of canonical practitioners and training methods, the development of dramaturgical forms and stage aesthetics and the political transformations attending the ends of the First and Second World Wars. Subjects of far-reaching transnational attention such as Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor are contextualised alongside theatre makers and practices that have gone largely unrecognized by international readers, while the participation of ethnic minorities in the production of national culture is given fresh attention. The essays in this collection theorise broad historical trends, movements, and case studies that extend the discursive limits of Polish national and cultural identity.
*Received Honorable Mention in The Polish Institute Of Arts And Sciences Of America's Anna M. Cienciala Award.
