Wednesday, Oct 09, 2024
5:30PM to 7:00PM
HQ107
We invite you to join us for a dramatic evening of dialogue with Alisa Zhulina (NYU Tisch) and her groundbreaking The Theater of Capital—with guests Julie Stone Peters (CU English/Law) and Marc Robinson (Yale FAS Dean), and moderated by Nuria Sánchez Matías (Spanish & Portuguese).
“The work of a true comparatist, Theater of Capital demonstrates, in a series of revelatory and nuanced readings, how canonical and not-so-canonical writers’ knowledge of money saturates the language—even the gestures—of their plays and prose.” – Martin Harries, University of California, Irvine.
Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater.
Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern UP, 2024) reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll’s House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.
Alisa Zhulina is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her articles and essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Performance Research, and several edited volumes.
Julie Stone Peters is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her most recent book is Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford UP, 2022)
Marc Robinson is Dean of Humanities and Malcolm G. Chace ‘56 Professor of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies and English. He is also Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. His books include The American Play: 1787-2000 and The Other American Drama. In addition, he is the editor of four books: Adrienne Kennedy: Collected Plays and Other Writings (Library of America, 2023), The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan, The Theater of Maria Irene Fornes, and Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. His new book, American Performance in 1976, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.