Dr. Diana Benea

Assistant Professor of English and American Studies

BA, University of Bucharest, 2008
MA, University of Bucharest, 2010
PhD, University of Bucharest, 2013
diana.benea@lls.unibuc.ro

Office hours: by appointment

COURSES TAUGHT

Contemporary Theatre: Representations of Crisis

Area Studies

BIO

Diana Benea is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Bucharest, where she teaches self-designed courses in 20^th and 21^st century American literature, methodologies in cultural studies, and contemporary American theatre. Her publications include a monograph and book chapters on Thomas Pynchon’s works, as well as articles on contemporary theatre practices.

She was a visiting doctoral researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin (2012) and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the City University of New York—The Graduate Center (2017-2018), with a research project on the politics and aesthetics of community-based theatre in the US. She has been recently awarded a research fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies – The British Library (2020).

Her current research focuses on the theory, praxis, and pedagogy of theatre for social change, particularly documentary and community-based formats, in the US as well as the Romanian context.

Book

The Political Imagination of Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels. Ars Docendi – University of Bucharest Press, 2017. ISBN 978-973-558-993-6.     

Edited special issue

Staging Crisis in Contemporary North American Theater and Performance. Special Issue of American, British and Canadian Studies, edited by Felicia Hardison Londré, Diana Benea, and Ludmila Martanovschi, Vol. 39, December 2022. [Web of Sciences – Emerging Sources Citation Index].

Articles and book chapters

• “Staging Undocumented Motherhood in Quiara Alegría Hudes and Erin McKeown’s Miss You Like Hell.” (M)other Perspectives: Staging the Maternal in 21st Century North American Theatre & Performance, edited by Aoise Stratford and Lynn Deboeck, Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies Series, Routledge, 2023. ISBN 9781032303116.

• “Thomas Pynchon.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, edited by Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen Burn, and Lesley Larkin, Wiley-Blackwell, 2022, pp. 1130-1136. ISBN13 9781119431718; ISBN10 1119431719.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0208.

• “Producing Community: A Process-Oriented Analysis of Ping Chong + Company’s Undesirable Elements: Generation NYZ (2018).” American Dramaturgies for the 21^st Century, edited by Julie Vatain-Corfdir, Sorbonne Université Presses, 2021, pp. 217-242. ISBN 979-10-231-1793-6.

• “Representing the Roma Experience on the Contemporary Romanian Stage: The Intersectional Lenses of Giuvlipen’s Anti-Racist and Feminist Theatre Works.” The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race, edited by Tiziana Morosetti and Osita Okagbue, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 101-120. ISBN: 978-3-030-43956-9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43957-6_6.

• “Reframing Borders: Acts of Citizenship and Modes of Belonging in the Recent U.S. Theater of Undocumentedness.” Representations and Images of Frontiers and Borders: On the Edge, edited by Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice and Alejandra María Aventín Fontana, Cambridge Scholars, 2021, pp. 1-19. ISBN13: 978-1-5275-7608-7.

• “‘What’s in a Name?’ The Institutionalization of American Studies in Romania.” Special issue on American, Latin American, and Canadian Studies in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Łukasz Wordliczek, Ad Americam: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 21, 2020, pp. 31-48. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12797/AdAmericam.21.2020.21.02. [ProQuest, EBSCO, ERIH+]. 

• “Thomas Pynchon’s Hybrid California(s): In Search of Spatial/Social Justice in Inherent Vice.” A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture, edited by Agata Zarzycka and Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice, McFarland, 2017, pp. 139-152. Print ISBN: 978-1-4766-6783-6. Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-2959-9.

• “Negotiating the Quandaries of Post-9/11 Pakistani American Identity in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced.” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2015, pp. 51-66. ISSN 1803-7720. [MLA International Bibliography, EBSCO].

• “Spaces of Native American Ghostliness in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Placing America: American Culture and Its Spaces, edited by Michael Fuchs and Maria-Theresia Holub, Transcript Verlag/De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 161-171. ISBN 978-3-8376-2080-1. DOI: 10.14361/transcript.9783839420805.161. [ISI Web of Science-Proceedings].