Fields: Dramatic Theory, Dramaturgy, Theatre and Transmedia Studies, Posthumanism, Disability Studies, and Polish Studies.

Magda Romanska’s scholarship has been recognized with two international awards: the Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from The American Society for Theatre Research and the Aquila Polonica Article Prize from The Polish Studies Association. She is the author of five books: The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor (2012), The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2014), and Boguslaw Schaeffer: An Anthology (2012).  Her Reader in Comedy: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (co-edited with Alan Ackerman), and The Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor (co-edited with Kathleen Cioffi) are both forthcoming in 2016.

She has published dozens of articles / essays / book chapters on theatre and performance. Her book chapters are anthologized in International Women Stage Directors (2013), Re-writing Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations (2012), The Sacred Tropes (2009), The Cultural Politics of Heiner Muller (2008), and Ghosts, Stories, Histories (2007). Other contributions include entries for The Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History (2009), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (2009), and The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama (2007).

Romanska’s current research project, The Bionic Body: Technology, Disability and Humanism, focuses on the idea of dignity as a dramatic and narrative concept in the context of posthuman aesthetics. The project investigates our perceptions of what is and isn’t a ‘human’ body—and challenge even the very need for such a category (within both secular and sacred discourses). Drawing on interdisciplinary research from philosophy, law, art, film, performance, theatre, and disability studies, the project grapples with fundamental questions of what it means to be (and to perceive oneself as) human (or unhuman): ontologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and dramaturgically. The project also examines how the voluntary cyborg-like enhancements of the human body redefine previous categories of what is and isn’t a disabled body. These types of representations cross boundaries at the very foundations of Western man’s self-perception, whereas the disabled body becomes a palimpsest on which the centuries of our culture have etched their aesthetic, religious, ethical, philosophical, scientific, and technological forces and tensions.

Romanska is also editing a collection of essays titled Postcolonial Approaches to Central and Eastern European Theatre, which analyzes Central and Eastern European theatre and history through the prism of colonial theory. This anthology aims to address this new direction in Slavic and Theatre studies, examining the limits and possibilities of this shift, particularly for theatre and performance studies.

In the past, Romanska has served on the editorial boards of Theater Magazine, the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, the Journal of Law and Theatre, 2b, An International Journal of Ideas, an interdisciplinary bilingual journal of socio-political theory and humanities, and Diacritics, a review journal of criticism and theory. She was also a founding editor of Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine. Currently, she’s on editorial boards of European Stages, Dramaturgies, The Cosmopolitan Review, Polish+Studies.Interdisciplinary, and The Polish Theatre Perspectives.

Romanska’s scholarship has been widely praised and reviewed including in New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Theatre Survey, Theatre Annual  A Journal of Performance Studies, Theatre Research International, American Theatre, Performer, Theatralia, The Cosmopolitan Review, Choice, and others.

You may follow her research on Academia.edu