Lizzie Stewart studied German and Russian as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh. This was followed by an MSc in European Theatre (awarded 2010), and a PhD (awarded 2015), both of which were AHRC-funded and taken at the University of Edinburgh. Along the way, she also studied in in Heidelberg and Moscow, and spent time based in Berlin, as a DAAD-funded researcher.

Lizzie taught German language, literature and culture from 2011-2014 at Edinburgh, and in 2014-15 was a Research Fellow in Assessment Practices there. She held positions as Teaching Fellow in German at the University of St Andrews (2015-2016), where she also taught in Comparative Literature at all levels, and as Teaching Associate in Modern German Studies at University of Cambridge (2016-17). She was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship in 2017, before being appointed as a Lecturer at King’s in 2017. 

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Cultures of migration
• 20th- and 21st-century political theatre and performance
• Intercultural theatre
• Turkish-German studies
• Cultural responses to 9/11

My research explores cultures of migration, with a dual focus on theatre, and the relationship between labour migration and cultural production. My first monograph, ‘Staging New German Realities: Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration’ (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan), brings a theatre and performance studies perspective into the scholarly discourse on Turkish-German culture and the after-effects of labour migration. The study unpacks the complex relationship between the behavioural ‘scripts’ society prescribes for its minority subjects, the literal scripts produced by those subjects, and the creation of new concepts of identity and performance practice which arise from the realisation of these scripts in performance.

My current research project, ‘Not Your Average Guest Worker: Cultural Labour and Migration’, continues this interest in theatrical practice in the Federal Republic as a ‘country of immigration’. It aims to shed new light on transnational leftist performance culture, arguing for a revised understanding of intercultural artistic processes in migration. This work has also led me to an interest in the role of Islam in contemporary German culture, as well as in the influence of cultural policy and the market on the aesthetic product, particularly the role of EU funding. I explore these avenues further in forthcoming publications.

I welcome enquiries for postgraduate supervision on topics in contemporary German or transnational performance, and on cultural production in migration, as well as on twentieth and twenty-first German literature, culture, and film in transnational context.

For more details, please see my full research profile.

Teaching

I have lectured widely on 20th- and 21st-century German Literature, Theatre, and Film in previous roles (Kafka, Brecht, Weiss, Heiner Müller Herta Müller, Jelinek, Akin, Kermani, Özdamar, Trojanow, Rimini Protokoll, Veiel) and have taught on playwrights and directors beyond the German context (from Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Dario Fo, to Bahram Beyzaie), as well as European literary and cultural topics (from The Song of Roland to the films of Guillermo del Torro).

At King’s I am in the process of developing cross-Modern Languages modules which explore:

• cultural labour and labour migration
• relationships between cultural policy, the market, and aesthetic practice
• the points at which artistic and political or economic concerns with managing bodies intersect,
• the EU as imagined community
• ways of encountering these questions beyond the Anglophone sphere

I also teach German to English translation at all levels.

Expertise and Public Engagement

• Talks for schools, and educational institutes such as the Princes’ Trust.
• Speaker at 10 year anniversary celebrations of the ‘postmigrant theatre’ movement: Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre, Berlin (31 May 2016).
• Co-organisation of ‘Neco Çelik: Postmigrant Theatre in Germany’:the visit of Turkish-German film and theatre director Neco Çelik to Edinburgh which included: a student-focused workshop, a film screening, a public discussion on ‘Theatre and Interculturalism in Germany and Scotland’ (5 to 7 May 2015).
• Creation of online educational materials (videos, discussion material, worksheets) relating to my research for the websites of the following projects:
  • Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (2014);
  • Who’s Watching Who? Theatre and Censorship (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2014);
  • German Film Learning Initiative (2014). [AQA recommended resource].