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 20th and 21st 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

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