Dr Elena Marchevska

Senior Visiting Fellow - Summer Semester 2022

Dr Elena Marchevska is a senior visiting research fellow in the field of excellence, spending summer semester 2022 in Graz.

Her current research focuses on how Europeanization process has been portrait in theatre plays and productions in three South-Eastern European countries and how theatre is used as a medium to discuss local and regional tension between European belonging and Balkan identities.

In her project “Balkan is not Dead: Staging European identity in South-East European” she will analyse both the cultural and social practices of Europeanization and how they are performed in the theatres. The aim is to discover imaginary hybrid forms of identity formation in the region in relation to Europe (in-between Occident and Orient ideas) as well as to elaborate on historical relations and to ascertain why these narratives are perpetuated in the current process of Europeanization (inter-generational symbolic transfer of concepts and values; as an example ideas of pan-slavic left activism).

"I focus on the work of three playwriters (Dejan Dukovski, Zlatko Topčić and Biljana Srbljanović) and three directors (Aleksandar Popovski, Kokan Mladenović and Dino Mustafić). I am particularly interested in how this artists challenge and question Europeanization in their work produced between late 1990s and early 2010."

Dr Marchevska is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at the London South Bank University, School of Arts and Creative Industries.