Home > Department Faculty : Cipriana Petre
Cipriana Petre (Ph.D. 2008, UC Irvine)
Dr. Petre is a theatre researcher, translator, and international cultural manager who has worked extensively in Central & Eastern Europe and the UK, coordinating projects for the Royal National Theatre London, Theater Instituut Nederland in Amsterdam, Weimar Cultural Capital of Europe, and other European performing arts institutions. Prior to coming to the US for her doctoral studies, she has been the Romanian coordinator of the British-Romanian theatre exchange network Noroc, comprising over eighty theatre institutions; she worked closely with one of Romania’s leading theatre directors, Mihai Maniutiu, as assistant director, literary advisor, dramaturge, executive producer for theatre and television; and for five years taught Rhetoric at University of Bucharest’s Department of Political Sciences. For the past five years, she toured UCI faculty and student productions to festivals in Romania, organized workshops and lecture series, in the frame of the American-Romanian Initiative at UCI which she established.
She graduated from the UC Irvine—UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Theatre and Drama in 2008.
Her dissertation, Twice-Mapping Romania: Towards a Performative Gridding of Politics and a Political Cartography of Theatre in communism and Post-communism, analyzes the theatricality of Romanian communist dictatorship during the second half of the 20th century (on both the secret stage of political prisons and the public stage of nation-as-prison), and the ways in which the memory of the nation’s collective traumatic past has reshaped the aesthetics and politics of theatre in post-communism. Her research is positioned at the crossroads of performance theory, history of political thought, and theatre historiography.
Current research interests include critical theory (especially Deconstruction, performance theory, theatre poetics by 20th century practitioners, and film studies); theory and history of the dramatic character; theory and history of stage directions; the role(s) of the theatre in a time of transition; and torture as spectacle, besides a continuing project looking at notions of performing history, and tortured women’s prison art.
She is currently working on two new books and teaches
Theatre History (TH3171-2) and Dramatic Literature Analysis (TH 4177-8) in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance
She authored two theatre books, Maniutiu: Theatre Images (2002) and Didascalia in opera lui Camil Petrescu: Ca o paranteza dezolata (“Didascalia in Camil Petrescu’s Theatre: Narrativizing the Dramatic Text”, 2001), co-authored three volumes (The Trilogy of the Double, 1997; Ten Steps Closer to Romania, 1999; and, with Bryan Reynolds, 2nd expanded edition of Performing Transversally, 2008), and published over one hundred articles, reviews, interviews and translations.