Multilingual as well as interdisciplinary, Loren Kruger’s research includes The National Stage (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on England France and America but has been cited by researchers from India to Ireland, Croatia to China, South Africa to Slovenia, and Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge University Press), which won the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Study awarded by the Modern Language Association. Her most recent book, Imagining the Edgy City covers film and fiction, public art and architecture as well as performance of poetry and theatre in Johannesburg “the Chicago of South Africa,” and compares Johannesburg with other cities from Chicago to Paris, Berlin to Bogotá, Sydney to São Paolo
Professor Kruger’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation; US Dept of of Education, the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Society of Theatre Research and teaching innovation supported by the Mellon Foundation for Languages Across Chicago, Center for Disciplinary Innovation, and U Chicago Arts. She has served as the editor of Theatre Journal, on the advisory boards of other journals from the African Media Journal to Theatre Research International. and on the executive committee of the American Society for Theatre Research
Work with Students
PhD thesis highlights: Economy and Ecology in the Contemporary African Novel; Theatre Culture and Everyday Life in Victorian England; Skepticism in Samuel Beckett and Stanley Cavell; The Immigrant Scene: Fiction, Film, and Theatre in Immigrant America
MA thesis highlights: Contemporary Indian Theatre in South Africa; Post-Apartheid Landscape in Nadine Gordimer’s stories; Class and Theatre in 1950s Britain; The Figure of the Artist in the Plays of Howard Barker; Walter Benjamin's "Theses on History" and the theory of drama
BA thesis highlights: Theatre and Atrocity in Post-World War II France; Aesthetics and Politics in the Bread and Puppet Theatre; Irish Nationalist History in Juno and the Paycock; adaptation and production of Une si longue lettre by Mariamma Bâ
Select Publications
Books
- A Century of South African Theatre (Methuen, 2019)
- Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg (Oxford, 2013)
- Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge, 2004) (winner of the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study 2005)
- The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910 (Routledge, 1999)
- The National Stage (Chicago, 1992)
Articles
- 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 (Palgrave 2018): 29-47.
- Theatre Lost, Performance Found, Critical Stages no. 15 (June 2017; special issue on African Theatre)
- Brecht: Our Contemporary? (Un)timely translation and the politics of transmission, Theatre Journal 68 (2016):299-309
- Dispossession and Solidarity in Athol Fugard and Juan Radrigán, Theatre Research International 40, no.3 (2015): 314-31
- Cape Town and the Sustainable City in the Writing of Henrietta Rose-Innes, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2:1-2 (2015), 15-33
- Tedium: An Essay on Drag, Attunement, Theatre and Translation. Comparative Drama, 48, no.4 (2014): 393-413
- The Drama of Hospitality: performance, migration and urban renewal in Johannesburg Performance and the City: Global Stages. Ed Kim Solga and DJ Hopkins (New York: Palgrave 2013): 19-39.
- “On The Tragedy of the Commoner,” Comparative Drama 46 (3) 2012: 355-76 (winner of the Philadelphia Constantinidis Prize for dramatic theory and the Greek inheritance.)
- What Time Is This Place? Continuity and Conflict in Urban Performance Sites: Lessons from Haymarket Square.” In The Politics of Space, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Wihstutz (London: Routledge 2013): 46-65
- “From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization,” Theatre Journal 64 (1) 2012: 119-27
- "Theatre: Regulation, Resistance and Recovery," in Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)