Branislav Jakovljević
Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities
Theater and Performance Studies
Bio
My research is highly interdisciplinary. I find it very rewarding to study performance in the context of visual arts, film and digital media, literature and poetry, critical theory, as well as larger social and historical processes. Most recently, I have been focusing on climate change and environmental justice. Over the past year, I have co-edited with my colleagues from TAPS Diana Looser and Matt Smith a two-part special issue of TDR: The Drama Review on performance and climate change. This research and teaching interest comes from my more long-term engagement with performance and politics.
My most recent monograph in English is Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945-1991 (University of Michigan Press, 2016) which received the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater for 2016-17 and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award, 2017. It has been translated into Serbian (2019) and Slovenian (2021). I co-translated and edited Radomir Konstantinović’s book The Philosophy of Parochialism, a groundbreaking analysis of the relation of the national literature and the formation of totalitarian ideas and political practices in a small European nation during the first half of the 20th century (University Michigan Press, 2021). My most recent book project is The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press), in which I investigate the relationship between performance art and theories of ideological formations from the 1970s until the present.
I hail from Yugoslavia, the country that was located in central and western Balkans, in southeastern Europe. There, I attended Drama Schools at universities in Skopje and Belgrade (present-day Northern Macedonia and Serbia, respectively). I worked as Dramaturg in professional theaters during and immediately after the completion of my BFA studies.
Most of my views on politics, ethics, justice, and the arts were informed by the unraveling of Yugoslavia in a series of bloody civil wars in the 1990s. I was active in anti-war movements before I left the country and remained active in pro-democracy publications in Serbia and the region of the former Yugoslavia. Some of these writings have been collected in the book Frozen Donkey and Other Essays (Smrznuti magarac i drugi eseji, Komuna Links, Belgrade 2017).
Both my MA and PhD are from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. While pursuing my PhD, I was active in the New York downtown theater and alternative press scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the subsequent years, I served on the board of Performance Studies international (PSi) and chaired the 19th PSi conference held at Stanford in June of 2013.
Before joining Stanford in 2006, I taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and University of Minnesota. In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate classes in my home department, over the years I served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, Director of Graduate Studies, and Chair (2015-2019). Some of the highlights from my tenure as Chair are: devising a strategic plan for the department that yielded the current structure of our undergraduate program, supervising the return of the department to the renovated Roble Gym, the establishment of Nitery Experimental Theater as the first fully student-run theater space on campus, working with the Dean’s office to set up Carl Weber graduate fellowships, and opening TAPS season-planning process to include all members of the department who are willing to participate (students, faculty, staff).
Academic Appointments
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Professor, Theater and Performance Studies
2024-25 Courses
- Citizenship in the 21st Century
COLLEGE 102 (Win) - Climate Change and the Arts
TAPS 26Q (Win) - Dramaturgy
TAPS 151, TAPS 315 (Spr) -
Independent Studies (1)
- Directed Reading
TAPS 390 (Aut, Win, Spr)
- Directed Reading
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Prior Year Courses
2023-24 Courses
- Can Beauty Save the World?: Climate Change and the Arts
TAPS 26N (Spr) - Citizenship in the 21st Century
COLLEGE 102 (Win) - History of Directing
TAPS 153H, TAPS 253H (Aut) - Learning from the Absurd: Drama for the Age of Anxiety
MLA 382 (Sum) - Political Performance
TAPS 362 (Spr)
2022-23 Courses
- Anthropo-Scene: Climate Change and the Arts
TAPS 26N (Spr) - Ars Theoretica: On Scholar-Artists
TAPS 341 (Win) - Dramaturgy
TAPS 151, TAPS 315 (Spr) - The Wretched of the Stage
TAPS 155W, TAPS 255W (Win)
2021-22 Courses
- Ars Theoretica: On Scholar-Artists
TAPS 341 (Aut) - Dramaturgy
TAPS 151, TAPS 315 (Spr) - History of Directing
TAPS 153H, TAPS 253H (Aut)
- Can Beauty Save the World?: Climate Change and the Arts
Stanford Advisees
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Michileen Oberst, Corina Ulescu -
Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Danielle Adair, Rashi Mishra, Adin Walker -
Doctoral (Program)
Lucas Baisch
All Publications
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Performance Art and the Novel
PAJ-A JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE AND ART
2024; 46 (3): 152-159
View details for DOI 10.1162/pajj_a_00741
View details for Web of Science ID 001317725100009
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Catastrophe of the Catastrophe Industrial Aristotelianism and the (Dis)Emplotment of the Capitalocene
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2023; 67 (1): 21-27
View details for DOI 10.1017/S1054204322000788
View details for Web of Science ID 001060364900004
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Under the Sign of The Mother The Wooster Group's Learning Play
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2023; 67 (1): 223-235
View details for DOI 10.1017/S1054204322000971
View details for Web of Science ID 001060364900027
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Madness as a Form of Knowledge: Pavel Ivanovich Karpov's Creativity of the Mentally Ill
ARTMARGINS
2022; 11 (1-2): 126-151
View details for DOI 10.1162/artm_a_00308
View details for Web of Science ID 000817296300010
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Elementary Poetry (Book Review)
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2021; 65 (4): 179-181
View details for DOI 10.1017/S1054204321000629
View details for Web of Science ID 000796289200016
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Peripeteia Rehearsing Against the End of the World
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2021; 65 (4): 6-10
View details for DOI 10.1017/S1054204321000496
View details for Web of Science ID 000796289200003
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The Peyote Dance (Book Review)
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2020; 64 (4): 177–79
View details for DOI 10.1162/dram_r_00974
View details for Web of Science ID 000591872800014
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The Ownership of Evil: 1968, 1989, and the Mainstreaming of the New Right
PRIMERJALNA KNJIZEVNOST
2020; 43 (3): 49–63
View details for DOI 10.3986/pkn.v43.i3.03
View details for Web of Science ID 000589432900004
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Pere Gynt Mendacity for the 21st Century
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2020; 64 (3): 8–13
View details for DOI 10.1162/dram_a_00938
View details for Web of Science ID 000562109700001
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The Drama of Space: Spatial Sequences and Compositions in Architecture (Book Review)
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2020; 64 (1): 168–70
View details for DOI 10.1162/dram_r_00903
View details for Web of Science ID 000517981000013
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Performance Art and Illiberal Democracy: Marina Abramovic's The Cleaner in Belgrade
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2020; 64 (1): 182–89
View details for DOI 10.1162/dram_a_00910
View details for Web of Science ID 000517981000010
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The Voice from the 10th Row: Carl Weber and the Berliner Ensemble
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2018; 62 (3): 55–108
View details for Web of Science ID 000443034000007
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THE HOWLING WILDERNESS OF THE MALADAPTIVE STRUGGLE IN BELGRADE IN NEW YORK
ARTMARGINS
2018; 7 (2): 17–41
View details for DOI 10.1162/artm_a_00207
View details for Web of Science ID 000436286400003
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For an Art of Participation Common goods for the commons
PERFORMANCE RESEARCH
2018; 23 (4-5): 210–13
View details for DOI 10.1080/13528165.2018.1506618
View details for Web of Science ID 000451381100045
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On Performance Forensics: The Political Economy of Reenactments
ART JOURNAL
2011; 70 (3): 50-54
View details for Web of Science ID 000298825700008
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Wooster Baroque
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-A JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2010; 54 (3): 87-122
View details for Web of Science ID 000281358700009
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Theater of Atrocities: Toward a Disreality Principle
PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
2009; 124 (5): 1813-1819
View details for Web of Science ID 000271077100041
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From mastermind to body artist - Political performances of Slobodan Milosevic
TDR-THE DRAMA REVIEW-THE JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
2008; 52 (1): 51-?
View details for Web of Science ID 000253434600005
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Human Resources: June 1968, Hair, and the Beginning of Yugoslavia's End
GREY ROOM
2008: 39-53
View details for Web of Science ID 000261748100002