Draft:Loren Kruger

Loren Kruger is a South African writer and translator based in Chicago. She holds a BA (Hons.) in English and Mathematics from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and completed independent study at the Institut d'études théâtrales in Paris and the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft in Berlin. Her areas of expertise include theatre and performance in Europe and the Americas as well as in her native South Africa, cinema and other media, and urban studies. She taught comparative literature, theatre and performance studies, cinema and media studies, and African studies at the University of Chicago (1986-2024). She edited Theatre Journal from 1996 to 1999, and served as contributing editor for Theatre Research International in 2002 and 2003.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from UCT, Cornell, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation in the United States, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Her writing has won awards including the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study from the Modern Language Association and the Philadelphia Constantinidis Prize from the Comparative Drama Association.

Books

• A Century of South African Literature. London: Bloomsbury. 2019.
• Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.
• Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, South and East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004.
  • Winner: Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study, Modern Language Association, 2005,
• The Drama of South Africa. London: Routledge, 1999
• The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992

Translations

• Pottier, Eugène (2024). Kruger, Loren (ed.). Beyond the Internationale: Revolutionary Writing. Translated by Kruger, Loren. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
• The Institutions of Art by Peter Bürger and Christa Bürger. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992
• Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture by Patrice Pavis. London: Routledge, 1991
• Edition
• Lights and Shadows: the Autobiography of Leontine Sagan. Edited with an introduction by Loren Kruger. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1996

Selected articles

• "Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry, and African America in the Drama of Lewis Nkosi". Research in African Literature. 54 (1): 1–17. 2023.
• "Theatre and Capital Once Again". Theatre Journal. 75 (4): 389–97. 2023.
• "Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South". Unitas. 95 (2): 114–35. 2022.
• Performance, Politics and Historiography: American Responses to the Paris Commune. Pamietnik Teatralny 70: 4 (2021): 70-100
• Performance and Politics at a Time of Confinement: Virtual Stages between South Africa and African America, Critical Stages no. 23 (2021: special issue on performance and politics)
• Glocal South Sides: Race, Capital and Performing Against Injustice, Theatre Journal 72 (2020): 469-85
• White Cities, Black Streets: Planned Violence and Native Maps in Richard Wright's Chicago and Modikwe Dikobe's Johannesburg. Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture. Ed. Elleke Boehmer and Dominic Davies. London: Palgrave, 2018: 29-47
• Dispossession and Solidarity in Athol Fugard and Juan Radrigán. Theatre Research International 40: 3 (2015); 314-31
• Cape Town and the Sustainable CIty in the Writings of Henrietta Rose-Innes, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2:1-2 (2015)
• "On Tedium: an Essay on Drag, Attunement, Theatre and Translation". Comparative Drama. 48 (4): 393–413. 2014.
• The Drama of Hospitality: Performance, Migration, and Urban Renewal in Johannesburg. Performance and the Global City. Ed. D.J. Hopkins and Kim Solgar. New York: Palgrave, 2013: 19-39
• What Time is this Place? Continuity, Conflict and the Right to the City: Lessons from Haymarket Square. Performance and the Politics of Space. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz. London: Routledge, 2012: 46-65
• "On the Tragedy of the Commoner: Elektra, Orestes and Others in South Africa". Comparative Drama. 46 (3): 355–77. 2012. Winner: Philadelphia Constantinidis Prize, 2013.