Alisa Ballard Lin is a scholar of Russian and East European theatre, with additional expertise in literature, film, and culture. Her research examines the theory and philosophy of historical theater performance in areas including Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. She has written and presented on theater’s relation to philosophy and psychology, theory and history of acting, religious performance, and costume design, all in the Russian and East European historical context.

Lin is currently writing a book entitled “I Don’t Believe You!”: Christianity, Performance, and Belief in Russia and East Central Europe. The book analyzes performance and theatricality within religious practices, as well as spirituality and allusions to Christianity in theatrical performances. The book focuses on theology and religious philosophy; church liturgy, ritual, and puppetry practices; theatrical theory; and theatrical performances in, about, and influenced by the church.

As a leading researcher on the Polish-Ukrainian born, Moscow-based writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Lin is now writing a companion to Krzhizhanovsky’s works for Academic Studies Press. The book will be the most comprehensive study of Krzhizhanovsky’s writings in any language.

Lin is also gathering research for a future book on the design of mass-marketed apparel in Eastern Europe, as well as ordinary dress as costume on the theatrical stage.

Lin’s published works include Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and (edited and translated) That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), as well as articles or chapters in Slavic and East European Journal, Modern Drama, Studies in Costume and Performance, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and The Routledge Companion to Performance and Science.

In parallel to her academic work, Lin does public writing on productivity, feminism, and the role of care in our lives. She authors a popular Substack newsletter, The Tending Project, and has a book under contract with Rutgers University Press. At OSU she is invested in mentoring students on time management concerns.

Teaching

• Masterpieces of Russian Literature (Russian 2250/2250H)
• Introduction to Czech Literature and Culture (Slavic 2345)
• Introduction to Ukrainian Culture (Slavic 2345.02)
• Modern Russian Experience through Film (Russian 3460)
• The Russian Spy: Cultures of Surveillance, Secret Agents, and Hacking from the Cold War through Today (Russian 3480)
• Theatre, Identity, and Citizenship in Eastern Europe (Slavic/Theatre 3711)
• The Russian Writer: Vladimir Nabokov (Russian 5250.04)
• Russian Translation: Theory, Practice, and the Profession (Russian 5630)
• Issues in 20^th and 21^st Century Literature (Russian 6253)
• Film Theory, Gender, and National Identity in Slavic Cinema (Slavic 6457)

Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor’s Mind in Russian Modernism (Northwestern University Press, 2025)

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.

That Third Guy: A Comedy from the Stalinist 1930s with Essays on Theater, translated and edited by Alisa Ballard Lin, foreword by Caryl Emerson (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018)

This collection of theater writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theater to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed. Its plot builds on Alexander Pushkin’s poem “Cleopatra,” while parodying the themes of Eros and empire in the Cleopatra tales of two writers Krzhizhanovsky adored: Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. In a chilling echo of the Soviet 1930s, Rome here is a police state, and the Third Guy (a very bad poet) finds himself in its dragnet. As he scrambles to escape his fate, the end of the Roman Republic thunders on offstage.

The volume also features selections from Krzhizhanovsky’s compelling and idiosyncratic essays on Shakespeare, Pushkin, Shaw, and the philosophy of theater. Professionally, he worked with director Alexander Tairov at the Moscow Kamerny Theater, and his original philosophy of the stage bears comparison with the great theater theorists of the twentieth century. In these writings, he reflects on the space and time of the theater, the resonance of language onstage, the experience of the actor, and the relationship between theater and the everyday. Commentary by Alisa Ballard Lin and Caryl Emerson contextualizes Krzhizhanovsky’s writings.