CS Issue No 27 Editors

Azadeh Sharifi is a Visiting (DAAD) Assistant Professor at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. Her work engages with (post)colonial and (post)migrant Theatre history, performances by artists of color and the intersections of race, class and gender in contemporary European performances. She is currently working on the project “Post-migrant German theatre history”). Previously, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Fine Arts (UdK) Berlin, Postdoc at the Department of Theatre Studies at LMU Munich and fellow at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures at FU Berlin. She is a Board Member of Performance Studies international (PSi).

Ulf Otto, Dr. phil., is Professor of Theatere Studies and Intermediality at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His research focuses on the interdependencies of theatricality and technology in industrial as well as post-industrial cultures. He studied theatre and computer science in Berlin, Toronto, and Paris, earned his doctorate with a thesis on early Internet culture at Hildesheim and was granted a Dilthey-Fellowship for his habilitation on the history of electricity in theatre. Other work has addressed gestures of reenactment (Transcript, 2012), algorithms of theatre (Alexander Verlage, 2020), and aesthetics of intervention (Theater der Zeit, 2022), and has appeared in Theater Journal, Theater Research International, and The Drama Review and Centaurus. Recent publications include the monograph The Theatre of Electricity. Technology and Spectacle in the Late 19th Century (Metzler 2020); the essay “Performing the Glitch: AI animatronics, android scenarios, and the human bias” (Theatre Journal 2021); and the anthology Aesthetics of Intervention. Interventions and Encroachments in the Regime of Theatre (Theatre of Time 2022). 

Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. For many years he also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece and the Hellenic Open University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. In 2019 his book Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published by University Studio Press. In 2022 his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter, was also published by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for various journals. He is currently the president of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, a member of the curators’ team of Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics.

Yana Meerzon is Professor at the University of Ottawa and President of Canadian Association for Theatre Research. Trained as a professional theatre critic in Moscow, Russia (GITIS), she also holds a PHD from University of Toronto, Canada. Yana is the author of three books, with the latest volume Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism published by Palgrave in August 2020. She co-edited seven collections of articles, including Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture with David Dean and Daniel McNeil (Palgrave 2020). Her current research project is entitled “Between Migration and Neo-Nationalism(s): Performing the European Nation — Playing a Foreigner”; and it has been funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Yana is the editor of the “Essays Section” of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques.

Matti Linnavuori wrote theatre criticism between 1978 and 2013 for various newspapers and weeklies in his native Finland. In 1985, he worked for the BBC World Service in London. Since 1998, he has presented papers at numerous IATC events. In the 2000s, he wrote for Teatra Vestnesis in Latvia. Since 1992, he has written and directed several radio plays for YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company. In March 2016, his play Ta mig till er ledare (Take me to your leader) premiered at Lilla Teatern in Helsinki.

Don Rubin is Managing Editor of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques. He is the General Editor of Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre and founding Editor of Canada’s national theatre quarterly Canadian Theatre Review. He is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at York University in Toronto and Founding Director and Former Chair of both York’s Department of Theatre and its MA/PhD Program in Theatre and Performance Studies. His volume Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings is a standard volume on the subject. He is a trustee of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship and President of the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (doubtaboutwill.org).