Laura Bradley

MA (Hons), MSt, DPhil (Oxon)

I grew up in Liverpool and graduated from the University of Oxford with a Congratulatory First in the MA in Modern History and Modern Languages (German). During my degree, I spent a year teaching at the Gesamtschule Rodenkirchen, Cologne, and made my first forays into theatre archives in Cologne and Berlin. I also hold an MSt in European Literature (Distinction) and a DPhil in German from the University of Oxford, and spent two years as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. I moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2005 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011 and to a Personal Chair in German and Theatre in 2016. Since 2022, I have been Dean of Postgraduate Research for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

My research focuses on theatre, politics, and censorship, with a particular focus on both Brecht and the GDR. I have published two monographs with Oxford University Press: Brecht and Political Theatre: 'The Mother' on Stage (2006) and Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961-1989 (2010), and I am delighted that OUP will be publishing my third monograph, Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship, in spring 2025. I have published extensively in leading journals on Brecht, GDR theatre censorship, and representations of crime in GDR film and television, and my latest article - currently under review - is on ghost stations in Cold War Berlin.

I enjoy collaborating with theatre practitioners and arts professionals, and sharing my research with the public. Theatres, broadcasters, and schools interested in collaborating with me are very welcome to get in touch.

Research Activity

Brecht

My first monograph, Brecht and Political Theatre (OUP, 2006), explored the performance history of Brecht’s play The Mother from its premiere in 1932 to 2006. As The Mother was the only play that Brecht directed in the Weimar Republic, in exile, and in post-war East Berlin, it is uniquely placed to show both how he developed as a theatre director and how he and later directors reinterpreted the play for new contexts and audiences. I went on to co-edit Brecht in the GDR: Politics, Culture, Posterity (Camden House, 2011) with Karen Leeder, and to write a new monograph, Brecht and the Art of Spectatorship (OUP, 2025), supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. This monograph explores vision, observation, and spectatorship in twelve of Brecht’s plays, spanning his career from the Weimar Republic to the GDR. It relates this analysis to his formative experiences of spectatorship, his poems and theories, and his productions. 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.

The German Democratic Republic

My second major area of research is East German censorship and cultural history, focusing on theatre but extending to poetry, crime and detection in television and film, and prose. My monograph Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961-1989 (OUP, 2010) used evidence from fifteen archives to investigate how GDR theatre censorship developed between the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall, how it varied across six regions, and how it affected genres ranging from classical tragedy to contemporary drama. My research on censorship attracted £115,780 in funding from the AHRC and British Academy, including a Follow-On Funding grant of £80,017, and it underpinned Impact case studies for REF2014 and REF2021.

As well as publishing articles on Brecht and theatre censorship, I have also published on contemporary German theatre, representations of crime and detection in the GDR, the Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and the poet Kito Lorenc.

Knowledge Exchange

I enjoy sharing my research with wider audiences, both nationally and internationally. In 2024, I appeared on an episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time on Brecht, after contributing to two episodes of the BBC Radio 4 programme Opening Lines to accompany a broadcast of Mother Courage as the weekend afternoon drama in 2023. I also contributed an interview on Brecht and Kenneth Tynan to Benjamen Walker’s podcast series on the Cold War. In 2020, I gave a talk on Brecht to over 200 students and teachers across South Africa via Zoom at a revision course organized by St John's College, Johannesburg. My YouTube video on Brecht's play The Caucasian Chalk Circle, made by the Unicorn Theatre in London, has attracted over 62,000 views, and it led to an invitation to advise on a production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle by the National Performing Arts Studio of Kenya, which premiered in Nairobi and toured to 8 towns and cities in Kenya in 2018, supported by the Kenyan Ministry for Education. Director Silvia Rieger used my research on The Mother for her production of the play at the Volksbühne, one of Berlin’s leading theatres, and I’ve provided academic support for productions of Brecht’s Arturo Ui at the Liverpool Everyman/Playhouse and of The Threepenny Opera by Fourth Monkey Theatre in Camden.

My research on East German theatre censorship sparked an exciting collaboration with the filmmaker Susan Kemp, the award-winning dramatist Peter Arnott, and the Playwrights’ Studio Scotland, funded by the AHRC. In 2014-15, Peter Arnott wrote a new play – Ensemble – about my research, and rehearsed readings of the finished play were performed on the largest stage at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Websters Theatre in Glasgow, and the Byre in St Andrew's. Susan Kemp made a documentary film called Writing Ensemble, shot on location in Berlin, Dresden, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. It has been shown at the Glasgow Film Theatre, Edinburgh Filmhouse, Scottish Storytelling Centre, and Hyde Picture House in Leeds, as well as at other screenings in Edinburgh and Berlin. I went on to co-organize a symposium with the Playwrights' Studio on collaborations between theatre practitioners and academics, and an event at the Being Human Festival. My public engagement work on censorship underpinned two impact case studies for REF2021 and REF2014, contributing to an excellent REF impact result.

The precursor to this project was a two-day special event at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2011, which Laura co-organised with Susan Kemp and Fiona Rintoul, at their invitation. The event was called 'The Stasi Are Among Us', and it featured 6 film screenings, introduced by the directors Thomas Heise, Claus Löser, Hannes Schönemann, and Rainer Simon. It also included roundtable discussions with the directors and readings of underground literature by the writers Johannes Jansen and Gabriele Stötzer.

Theatres, broadcasters, and schools are very welcome to get in touch with me to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

External Research Grants

• British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant (2018-21)
• AHRC Follow-On Funding Award (2014-15)
• DEFA-Stiftung Grant (2010-11)
• AHRC Research Leave Award (2009)
• British Academy Small Research Grant (2006-8)
• Carnegie Trust Awards (2006, 2009, 2012)
• DAAD Award (2004)
• AHRC Studentships (1999-2000, 2000-2003)

I teach German language and literature to undergraduates at all levels, and enjoy teaching grammar as much as literature and theatre! My specialisms include an Honours Option on Bertolt Brecht, a second-year option on Culture, Modernity and the City in the Weimar Republic, lectures on the dramatist Christoph Hein and Brecht's exile poetry, as well as a range of German language classes. I led the development of a suite of six new interdisciplinary DELC courses, such as Cultural Responses to War, which have now been running successfully for a number of years, and I also led the development of our current second-year German options.

At MSc level, I supervise dissertations for students on the MSc in Comparative Literature and MSc in Translation Studies, and I have supervised several MSc by Research students working on their own tailor-made programmes of research. I've also taught on a range of MSc courses, such as Autonomy of Performance; Theatre, Performance, Performativity; and Brecht and Beyond.

Past PhD students supervised

Anna McEwan: 'Gendered Citizenship and Women's Relationship to Systems of Social Care: Investigating the GDR’s Frauenparadies (1971-1989)'. Joint supervision with the University of Glasgow (History). Funded by SGSAH, completed 2024. Anna now holds a Leverhulme Study Abroad Scholarship at the University of Potsdam.

Lucy Byford: 'Staging the Carnivalesque: Subversive Strategies in Print and Performance from Simplicissimus to Dada'. Funded by SGSAH, completed 2023. Lucy is currently a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bremen.

Katie Hawthorne: 'Contextualising Liveness: A Comparative Study of Digitally Distributed, Digitally Mediated and Digitally Located Performance in Edinburgh and Berlin, 2017-19'. Funded by the Wolfson Foundation, completed 2022. Katie went on to hold a Fellowship at the Academy for Theatre and Digitally in Dortmund, and now works for the Academy as well as writing for publications including The Guardian.

Lizzie Stewart: 'Turkish-German Scripts of Postmigration: Mimesis and Mimeticism in the Plays of Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu/Günter Senkel'. Funded by the AHRC. Monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan. Lizzie is now Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages, Culture & Society at King's College London.

Michael Wood: ‘Making the Audience Work: Textual Politics and Performance Strategies for a "Democratic" Theatre in the Works of Heiner Müller. Funded by the AHRC. Monograph published by Camden House. Michael went on to hold a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

Patrick Harkin: 'On the Horns of a Dilemma: Clarity and Ambivalence in Oppositional Writing in the Wake of the Uprising of 17 June 1953 in the German Democratic Republic'. Funded by the AHRC. Patrick published his research on Brecht in volume 5 of the Edinburgh German Yearbook.