Jun. Prof. Dr. Benjamin Wihstutz

I am (Junior) Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the Department for Film, Theater, Media and Cultural Studies (FTMK) at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and Principal Investigator (PI) of Project A02: “Disability Performance as Human Differentiation: Performances of Deviance and Merit in Historic Perspective” at the Collaborative Research Center 1482. I hold a PhD in theater studies from Freie Universität Berlin.

My research interests

My research interests include disability and performance, contemporary theater, documentary theater, theories of space and time, disability and performance studies, the dissolution of boundaries in the arts since the 1950s, freak and sideshows around 1900, and the history of theater audiences since the 18th century.

Publications

In addition to two monographs, “Theater der Einbildung” (Theater der Zeit 2007) and “Der andere Raum” (Diaphanes 2012), that I published in German, I am the editor of numerous internationally received anthologies, including “Disabled Theater” (Diaphanes/Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), “Transformative Aesthetics” (Routledge 2017), “Methoden der Theaterwissenschaft” (Transcript 2020), “#Corona Theater,” “Der Wandel der performativen Künste in der Pandemie” (Theater der Zeit 2022), and “Out of Time? Temporality in Disability Performance” (Routledge 2023).

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich