Margherita Laera Email and Phone Number

Dr Margherita Laera is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she is Director of Research and Innovation for the School of Arts (Drama, Film, Media, Music and History of Art). She teaches contemporary theatre-making and adaptation for the stage. Margherita is currently a Trustee of Actors Touring Company and a member of the ExComm of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance.Her research interests include contemporary theatre in Europe, especially Italy; adaptation and translation for the stage; migration and multilingual performance; ‘classical’ Greek tragedy and its modern appropriations; theatre criticism; theatre and ideology.Margherita studied Classics, Comparative Literature and Theatre Studies in Milan, Paris and London. Since 2011, she has won research funding worth over £450k from the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, Creative Europe and Arts Council England. She has curated several theatre-related projects for the Italian Cultural Institute in London, such as Performing Italy 1 and 2 (with Suq Festival, Genoa) and Playground 1 and 2 (with PAV, Rome). Her website of teaching and learning resources, www.performinginternationalplays.com, offers school enrichment workshops to engage secondary school students with international plays in collaboration with Foreign Affairs theatre company.She is the editor of 'Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat'​ (Bloomsbury 2014) and 'Londra: Brexit Stage Left' with Bojana Jankovic (Cue Press 2020), and the author of 'Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy' (Peter Lang 2013), and ‘Theatre & Translation’ (Red Globe Press 2019). Margherita has recently completed a monograph for Routledge about contemporary playwriting and theatre translation in Europe, commissioned by the EU-funded project Fabulamundi: Playwriting Europe. The book, entitled 'Playwriting in Europe: Mapping Ecosystems and Practices with Fabulamundi', was published in 2022.Alongside academia, Margherita is involved in theatre-making as a translator, dramaturg, curator & producer. She has translated Italian plays into English by authors such as Stefano Massini, Magdalena Barile, Davide Carnevali, Francesca Garolla, Nalini Vidoolah Mootoosamy and Valentina Diana. Her translation and adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing for director Veronica Cruciani opens in Verona in Summer 2024.Margherita is currently working on an Anthology of Contemporary Italian Plays for Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, due to be published in 2025.