Alisa Ballard Lin is a scholar of East Central European theater and performance, with additional expertise in literature, as well as teaching competency in film and culture. Her research examines the theory and philosophy of historical theater performance in areas including Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and Czechia. She has written and presented on theater’s relation to philosophy and psychology, philosophy and history of acting, religious performance, and costume design, all in the East Central European historical context. Much of her work has thus far centered on the modernist period.

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. She has co-edited with Rachel Merrill Moss and Dennis C. Beck the forthcoming volume Performing Refuge and Risk: Precarious Theatre in East Central Europe (University of Iowa Press).

Lin’s current projects include: a book on theological concepts of belief in East Central European theatrical performances that draw on the church, as well as in religious practices that utilize performance; a companion to the Polish-Ukrainian born, Moscow-based writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; a co-translated volume of writings by Alexander Tairov; and the volume Stanislavsky and Research Methods (Routledge), for which she is a co-editor. Her far future work will address the theory of fashion and theatrical costume in East Central Europe, as well as the literature of Vladimir Nabokov.

In parallel to her academic work, Lin does public writing on knowledge-work productivity, feminism, and the role of care in our lives. She authors a popular Substack newsletter, The Tending Project, and is completing a trade book entitled Tending: Realistic Productivity for Everyone with a Life outside of Work for Rutgers University Press.

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)
• East European Fashion: Trends, Textiles, and Traditions (Slavic 3900)
• The Russian Writer: Vladimir Nabokov (Russian 5250.04)
• The Russian Writer: Lev Tolstoy (Russian 5250.05)
• Russian Translation: Theory, Practice, and the Profession (Russian 5630)
• Russian Modernism (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.

CV 2025