Professional Affiliation

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, Sewanee: The University of the South 

Expert Bio

E. Susanna Weygandt’s research focuses on performance theories indigenous to Russia and East Europe. Her research appears in The Russian Review, TDR: The Drama Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Apparatus: Film, Media, and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, and in her co-edited Russian New Drama: An Anthology (Columbia UP, 2019). This research has shaped her into a scholar and teacher of visual language, film, the body, feminist art, gender, exhibition and archive on digital platforms, performance studies, and all genres of documentary and realism. She received her PhD from Princeton University's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Central to her first book, From Metaphor to Direct Speech: Contemporary Russophone Drama and Performance Theory (Release date December 2024, University of Wisconsin Press), is documentary drama. Through document, interview, and ethnography, the dramas attempt to capture representations of an evolving understanding of national identity in the post-Soviet transformation of the region. In a journal publication and in digitalization of the 3-D (performance), Weygandt will show that marginal ethnic and social groups have been represented in docudramas in Russia and East Europe in the past 20 years, and that the artistic and formal techniques in these productions facilitate spaces in which audiences are encouraged to reconsider and reevaluate their assumptions about the topic of “otherness” discussed on the stage. Additional research will be devoted to how women film directors from Russia and the East European region approach the paradoxical topic of documentary art through their oeuvre. 

Wilson Center Project

“Transnational Documentary Drama: Performance Art of Dissent in Russia & East and Central Europe”