The Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures is proud to welcome our new assistant professor Dr. Alisa Ballard to Ohio State! She researches 19th- and 20th-century Russian theater, literature, and philosophy, with special attention to theory and philosophy of performance. Her monograph in progress investigates how artists and intellectuals in 1900s-1930s Russia conceived of the physical, psychological, and philosophical relationships between actor and audience and between actor and role in the theater. The book argues that in the modernist period the Russian theater takes a broadly phenomenological turn. Key figures in the book include Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, Alexander Tairov, Gustav Shpet, and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Ballard is also completing a book of translations of Krzhizhanovsky's play The Third One (1937) and his writings on theater, with introductory essays and annotations. Her additional research interests include Russian film and visual culture, consciousness and cognition in the theater, authorship, realism, emotion and affect, Soviet subjectivity, Polish literature and performance, and the intersection of philosophy with literary forms.

Welcome Dr. Ballard!