Nora Steiner (she/her) completed her PhD in September 2026, titled “Involved Emotions. How Emotions, Dramaturgy, and Ethics Intertwine and Build Relationships Between Us” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer and Prof. Dr. Christa Binswanger. She explores the question of what emotions do in theater and what theater does with emotions, employing methods of performance and discourse analysis. The dissertation addresses the following questions: How do emotions produce bodies and subjects? How do emotions orient bodies toward one another? How are emotions categorized dramaturgically and ethically? How are specific discourses on emotions negotiated—produced, deconstructed, criticized, transformed, or proposed as alternatives? Or, in short: How does theater work with emotions to convey ethical stances?
Nora Steiner studied theater studies, philosophy, and gender studies at the University of Bern and the Freie Universität Berlin. Both her bachelor’s thesis on collective identity in solo theater forms and her master’s thesis were published in the series Berner Arbeiten zur Theater- und Tanzwissenschaft (BATT). Her master’s thesis, titled “Directing as the Art of the White Man? How the Modern Theatre Director Is Constructed as a White, Male ‘Genius’” combines a discourse analysis of theater historiography with gender-theoretical, poststructuralist, and postcolonial considerations.
From 2020 to 2022, she was employed as a student research assistant to Prof. Dr. Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer. From 2021 to 2022, she also worked as a tutor for the lecture on European theatre history and for the introductory course, which she had helped design in the summer of 2020. As a doctoral candidate and lecturer, beginning in the fall of 2022, she regularly taught the introductory seminar on theater studies as part of the introductory course module, as well as a one-time introductory seminar on dramaturgy and performance analysis, a seminar on affect_dramaturgy, a seminar on pop dramaturgies, and a seminar on storytelling.
In addition, Nora Steiner works as a director and dramaturg in the independent theater scene. Both in her practical work and in her research, she is interested in the extent to which theater can expose and subvert socially constructed norms.
