Loren Kruger

Loren Kruger (1958-) is an academic and theatre historian who as worked extensively on South African theatre.

Biography

Born in South Africa, educated in Johannesburg and at the University of Cape Town (BA Honours), Loren Kruger is a writer and translator based in Chicago.

Further education: MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell University (1986) and study at the Institut d'études théâtrales at the University of Paris III (funded by Cornell) and at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft Free University of Berlin (funded by DAAD). She was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Theater and Performance Studies and African Studies at the University of Chicago from 1986 to 2024.

Her focus is on literature and visual culture in South Africa, and drama and performance in English, French, German and Spanish across Africa, the African diaspora, the Americas, and Europe. Her research in South Africa and elsewhere has been supported by the Deutscher Academischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (US), and the Universities of Chicago and the Witwatersrand

She was the editor of Theatre Journal (1996-99) and has served on the editorial boards of Theatre Research International, the South African Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Scrutiny2, and The South African Media Journal. Affiliated with the Committees of African Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies as well as the Departments of Comparative Literature and German in Chicago.

Author of numerous books, articles and translations

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Her best known books on South African theatre and culture are: A Century of South African Theatre (Bloomsbury 2020) The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Publics Since 1910 (Routledge, 1999);Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge, 2004), which won the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literature awarded by the the Modern Language Association (USA), Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg (Oxford, 2013) . She has also edited Lights & Shadows. The autobiography of Leontine Sagan (Witwatersrand University Press, 1996),

Translations of academic works include:

Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture by Patrice Pavis (Routledge 1991), and from German The institutions of art by Peter and Christa Bürger (University of Nebraska Press)

Beyond the Internationale: Revolutionary writings by Eugène Pottier, Communard (a selection of works by the author of the Internationale, edited and translated by Kruger, Chicago: Charles H Kerr, 2024)

Articles include:

"Theatre and Capital Once Again," Theatre Journal 75: 4 (2023 anniversary issue): 389-97

"Black Irony: Modernism, Mimicry and African America in the Drama of Lewis Nkosi" Research in African Lituratures 54: 1 (2023), 1-17

"Brechtian Theatre and the Glocal South" UNITAS 95: 2 (2022: centennial issue): 114-35

"Performance, Politics and Historiography: American Responses to the Paris Commune," Pamietnik Teatralny 70: 4 (2021: special issue on historiography): 79-100

"performance and politics in a time of confinement: virtual stages between South Africa and Afrian America." Critical Stages no. 23 (2021)

"Glocal South Sides: Race, Capital and Performing Against injustice in Chicago and Johannesburg," Theatre Journal 72: 4 (2020), 469-85

"Cape Town and the Sustainable City in the Writing of Henrietta Rose-Innes" Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 2:1-2 (2015), 15-33

"Africa Thina: Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency in Johannesburg's Film and Television Drama," Journal of Southern African Studies 35 (2009)

"White Cities, Diamond Zulus and the African Contribution to Human Advancement: African Modernities at the World's Fairs," TDR 51 (3) 2007: 19-45

“From the Cape of Good Hope: South African Drama and Performance in the Age of Globalization,” Theatre Journal 64 (1) 2012: 119-27

"Theatre: Regulation, Resistance and Recovery," in Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)

"'Black Atlantics,' 'White Indians,' and 'Jews': Locations, Locutions, and Syncretic Identities in the Fiction of Achmat Dangor and others," South Atlantic Quarterly 100: 1 (2001 special issue: Atlantic Genealogies): 111-43. This article is available in South Africa in Scrutiny2 vol. 7, no.2 (2002): 34-50

"'Shoo—this book makes me to think!': Education, Entertainment, and 'Life-Skills Comics' in South Africa," (with Patricia Watson Shariff) Poetics Today 22: 2 (2001): 475-513 (South Africa in the Global Imaginary: CELJ prize for best special issue in 2001)

Writing as Loren A. Kruger, "Lara Foot", published in Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Greg Homann (editors). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

See also Bibliography section for publications on South African theatre)

(TH/LK)