New Books on Brecht: Laura Bradley and Katherine Hollander in conversation with Tom Kuhn

About the event

Laura Bradley and Katherine Hollander will join Tom Kuhn to discuss their new books on German playwright, Bertolt Brecht:

• Laura Bradley, Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship (Oxford University Press, 2025)
• Katherine Hollander, Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2025)

'Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht' offers a fresh historical perspective by de-centring Brecht and contextualizing him within a small group of peers. Katherine Hollander’s book investigates how the members of this group understood their collaborative work in the context of their commitments to fighting fascism and building socialism.

It illuminates a community that coalesced first in Vienna and Berlin and intensified as it moved into exile in Denmark after 1933. Beginning not with Brecht but with the actor Helene Weigel and her mentor, the Danish feminist Karin Michaëlis, the book takes seriously the women of the group and their ideas about socialism, gender, collaboration, and art.

Brecht’s epic theatre sought to change how spectators watched performances, equipping them to critique and intervene in the world outside the theatre. In 'Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship', Laura Bradley explores vision, observation, and spectatorship in twelve of his plays, spanning his career.

The book relates this analysis to Brecht's own formative experiences of spectatorship, to his poems and theories, and to productions directed by Brecht and his close collaborators. Finally, it investigates Brecht's attempts to transform the composition of the audience and cultivate critical spectatorship at the Berliner Ensemble after the Second World War.

About the speakers

Laura Bradley is Chair of German and Theatre, and Dean of Postgraduate Research, at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship (OUP, 2025), Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961-1989 (OUP 2010), and Brecht and Political Theatre: ‘The Mother’ on Stage (OUP, 2006), and the co-editor of Brecht and the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity (Camden House, 2011). She is on the Editorial Board of the International Brecht Yearbook and the Brecht Studies book series, and has worked with theatres and broadcasters in the UK and internationally.

Katherine Hollander is a poet and historian. Her first book of poems, My German Dictionary, won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and was published by the Waywiser Press in 2019. She joined the board as an associate editor in 2021. She is the editor of a student edition of Mother Courage and her Children (Bloomsbury/Methuen, 2022) and the author of Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950 (Bloomsbury/Methuen 2025). Her creative and scholarly work have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, New German Critique, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and European history at Tufts University.

Tom Kuhn is Emeritus Fellow at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, UK. He was General Editor of Bloomsbury Methuen Drama’s Brecht series. Publications include Brecht on Theatre (2015), Brecht on Performance (2015) and The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht (2019).

How to attend

This event is free to attend, and open to all. Attendance is online only, and you can reserve your spot via Eventbrite. Joining details will be sent out to registrants in due course.

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