Dr. Mary Karen Dahl
Professor, Head - Theatre Studies
Office: 850.644.7238
E-Mail: mkdahl@admin.fsu.edu
Fax: 850.644.7408
Mary Karen Dahl (Professor, Theatre Studies; Head of MA/PhD Theatre Studies Program) has a longstanding interest in the relationship between performance and politics. She writes on the ethics of violence, theatre and terror, and theatre and political theories of citizenship and the state. Her book Political Violence in Drama: Classical Models, Contemporary Variations was selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1987. It uses theoretically informed close readings of plays to address a central question, how/if killing to save the world can be justified, using texts by Aeschylus, Bertolt Brecht, Howard Brenton, Albert Camus, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco, Slawomir Mrozek, Sophocles, and Ernst Toller. Related essays include "Postcolonial British Theatre: Black Voices at the Center," in Imperialism and Drama for Routledge, "Stage Violence as Thaumaturgic Technique," in Violence in Drama, for Cambridge University Press, and "State Terror and Dramatic Countermeasures," in Politics and Terror in Modern Drama, for Edinburgh University Press.
Her work in progress poses questions about political theory and citizenship: A book manuscript, provisionally titled Theatre for New Times, draws on British political thinkers such as Stuart Hall and David Held and contemporary British playwrights including David Edgar, Hanif Kureishi, Maria Oshodi, Winsome Pinnock, and Timberlake Wertenbaker. “Mediating Truth: The Competition to Shape Reality” is the umbrella concept for a series of essays on media and theatrical treatments of contemporary events such as the “Behzti Affair” and the case of Stephen Lawrence in the United Kingdom.