Congratulations to Dr. Lin on the publishing of her new book: Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism - Make sure you pick up your copy today!

"'Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism’s reinvention of the actor'

In this wide-ranging study, Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind, profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness, perception, identity, and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater—from around the turn of the century through the mid-1930s—to stimulate, train, imagine, and ultimately understand the actor’s, as well as the spectator’s, mind. Discussing key figures of the period, including Nikolai Evreinov, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Alexander Tairov, Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized, industrialized, and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it," (Northwestern University Press). 

Learn more about Dr. Lin and her other works and research on her faculty page! 

Alisa Ballard Lin’s research is on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and East European theater, literature, film, and culture, with particular focus on the theory and philosophy of performance. Her research interests include theater’s interactions with philosophy and psychology, history of acting, religious performance, gender and celebrity studies, the medical humanities, and the material history of textiles and fashion in Russia and Eastern Europe.

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