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.

Lin is currently writing a monograph on the intersections of Christian and theatrical belief across Russia and Eastern Europe. Entitled “I Don’t Believe You!”: Christianity, Performance, and Belief in Russia and Eastern Europe, the book examines performance and theatricality within religious practices, as well as spirituality and allusions to Christianity in theatrical performances. In the book Lin examines 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 monograph on the construction, design, and philosophy of the gendered body in Soviet film and theater costumes, as well as in everyday Soviet dress.

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 authors a popular Substack newsletter on the intersection of care work and productivity, at wewhotend.substack.com. Lin’s writings on productivity and time management attend to the ways in which our lives as a whole (parenting and caregiving duties, familial commitments, disabilities) affect how we work. 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.