Directors Invent ‘Theatricality’: Focus on Vsevolod Meyerhold and Ariane Mnouchkine

Maria Shevtsova is the Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, having held Chairs previously at the University of Lancaster (Founding Chair) and University of Connecticut, USA. She was Director of the Centre for European Studies at the University of Sydney. She has established the sociology of theatre and performance as a discipline, and has developed various methodologies for this area of research, including sociocultural performance analysis and contextualization.

Shevtsova’s administrative duties at Goldsmiths include Director of Research, PhD Admissions and Staff Development in the Department of Drama, and numerous major committees such as the Research and Enterprise Committee of Goldsmiths as a whole. Her teaching experience is considerable, both national and international, involving students of various levels from undergraduate to postgraduate. In recent years she has focused on postgraduate students, running an MA course Performance and Culture and a PhD Seminar on Research Methodologies, as well as Goldsmiths-wide seminars on Academic Practice.

Her books include Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (2004), Robert Wilson (2007), Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre (2009) and Sociology of Theatre and Performance (2009). She is the author of more than one hundred articles in refereed journals and chapters of collected volumes, including ‘Peter Brook’ in The Routledge Companion to Directors’ Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown (2008). She is co-editor ofNew Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press), an editor of Critical Stages, the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics, and on the Editorial Board of numerous international journals, including theStanislavsky Journal (online journal).