Dr. Lianna Mark

BIO

Lianna Mark is an Associate Member of the Excellence Cluster "Temporal Communities" at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research sits at the intersection of literary, cultural, and theatre studies, with a particular interest in the relationship between narrative form and notions of political efficacy in contemporary cultural markets. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD in English and Theatre Studies from King's College London, and she studied Modern, Comparative and Postcolonial Literature at the Universities of Bologna and Paris Sorbonne. Before joining LMU in April 2023, she worked at Durham University (UK) and King's College London. She has held DFG- and DAAD-funded research fellowships at "Temporal Communities" and in the department of Theatre Studies at the Freie Universität. Beyond her own research, she has worked as Associate Researcher for the EU-funded project "Fabulamundi Workbook: Mapping Contemporary Playwriting and Theatre Translation Practices in Europe", and as a theatre and literary translator. Her research has been published in Comparative Drama and in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, and she has co-edited an issue of Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts. She is currently working on two monographs: the first, Theatres of Autofiction, will be published in 2024 with Cambridge University Press; the second, Narrating Political Engagement on Stage: British New Writing in the 2000s, is forthcoming in 2025 in Methuen Drama's Engage series.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

British New Writing for the Stage
Theatre and the Political
Contemporary Theatre, Literature and Culture
Storytelling and Narrative Studies
Autofiction
Cultural Materialism & Cultural Industries
Translation

PUBBLICATIONS

Forthcoming:

Mark, Lianna. (2025). Narrating Political Engagement on Stage: British Theatre in the 2000s. London: Bloomsbury.

Mark, Lianna. (2024). Theatres of Autofiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In print:

Mark, Lianna. (2023). “‘Who Gets to Speak and How?’: Staging Autofiction in Debris Stevenson's Poet in da Corner (2018) and Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018).” In The New Wave of British Women Playwrights, edited by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau. CDE Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter, 131-150. DOI: 10.1515/9783110796322-009

Goodling, Emily, and Lianna Mark. (2022.) “‘Be Yourself, Inasmuch as it Suits the Job’: ‘Authenticity’ at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater and London’s Royal Court Theatre.” Comparative Drama, 55 (2), 39-66, DOI:
10.1353/cdr.2022.0002

(2022). Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, 16 (1).

Mark, Lianna. (2016). “‘Opera Singing Interrupted’: Simon Stephens’
Carmen Disruption.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4 (2), 385-403, DOI: 10.1515/jcde-2016-0024

AWARDS, PRIZES & FUNDING

2023: Postdoctoral Fellowship, Excellence Cluster "Temporal Communities:
          Doing Literature in a Global Perspective", Freie Universität Berlin
2021: Irish Society of Theatre Research (ISTR), Early Career Bursary
2021: Nomination for King’s College London's "Graduate School Elsevier Outstanding Doctoral Thesis" Prize
2020: London Arts and Humanities Partnership Research Support Fund
2019-2020: DAAD Doctoral Research Grant
2018: London Arts and Humanities Partnership Overseas Research Trip Fund
2017: King’s College London Creative Committee Fund
2016-2019: Arts and Humanities Research Council (London Arts and Humanities Partnership) PhD Scholarship, full stipend