Sanja Nikčević


Sanja Nikčević is a Croatian theatre critic and distinguished professor of theatre history in the drama department of the Arts Academy of Osijek, Croatia. She is also head of the drama module of the doctoral program in literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Osijek. She is the president of the Croatian Critics' Association and Governing Board of Matica hrvatska. Nikčević lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
WWW sanjanikcevic.comFB sanja.nikcevic.1

Education and work

Nikčević was born in Varaždin. At the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb she obtained a BA, MA and Ph.D. in American drama. She worked as a journalist and theatre critic for the Croatian daily newspaper Večernji list, was an advisor for theatre in the Croatian Ministry of Culture, and was a freelancer.

Academic career

Nikčević was a Fulbright scholar and lectured at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2001. Since 2003, she has been employed in the English department, teaching courses on American and British drama, where she still works in the Ph.D. literature program. Since 2007 she has been employed at the Arts Academy in Osijek where she teaches courses on the history of world drama and theatre.

Activities in international and national associations

Nikčević was the founder and first president of the Croatian Center of ITI-UNESCO where she organized numerous international events. Since 2004 she was secretary, since 2010 she was president of a national theatre critics' organization, and since 2014 she was a member of the main governing board of Matica hrvatska.
She has served as an EXCOM board member for ITI Worldwide for two terms and is an active member of numerous international and American associations of scholars and critics.

Editorial activities

At the Croatian center of ITI Nikčević founded and edited the publication Croatian drama and . She was the editor of Mansions until 2004 and published more than thirty books. From 1998 to 2002 she was the editor of the Croatian mainstream theatre journal Theatre. She founded Ars Academica where she was editor from 2009 to 2013.

Publishing activities and field of interest

Her main topics of research are American drama, contemporary European drama, Croatian war drama and theatre criticism and history of theatre. She has participated in more than one hundred national, American, and international symposiums. She has published more than one hundred articles on European and American theatre in English which were published in the US, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Slovakia, Macedonia and Slovenia in academic or theatre journals and academic-edited volumes, and forwards of books. Nikčević publishes theatre reviews in the Croatian weekly cultural newspaper. She has published six books and edited six anthologies.

American drama

In Croatia Nikčević has edited the Anthology of American Plays in two volumes and published three books on American drama: The Subversive American Drama or Sympathy for Losers ''; Affirmative American Drama or Long Live the Puritans and Losers' Genius in Our Town. ''
In these books she introduced a new classification of American drama based on the attitude of plays toward the main American myth, the American dream. Plays depicting losers and failures of the American dream she calls subversive. Plays that show characters who can accept their position in life and make the most of it she designates as affirmative American plays.

European drama and new trends

Nikčević's book on the spread of in-yer-face theatre from its origin in 1990s Britain all over Europe, New European Drama or The Great Deception, was both attacked and praised. It has been translated into Slovak and Bulgarian. Selected chapters were published in several languages – English, Polish and Hungarian. It has been included as a rare non-English book as literature on the official website of in-yer-face theatre by British critic Aleks Sierz, whose book was the first to define the genre. Nikčević's book received the prestigious Croatian Award. After five years, in 2009, the second edition was published, including not just an additional chapter about the destiny of new European drama over those five years, but also reactions to the book.

Croatian drama

Nikčević edited the first anthology of Croatian plays published outside of Croatia: Anthology of Contemporary Croatian Drama.
Her book on Croatian drama What is Croatian drama to us?, deals with some less-fashionable but very important writers, genres and topics
She offered a new classification of Croatian drama based upon the attitude of the drama toward reality, where she proves that this attitude has three points: politics, emotions and intertextuality. Some decades are dominant in dealing with one point: the 1960s and 1970s with politics as a means for the destruction of the individual, the 1980s dealing with emotions and the inner world of the hero, authors of the 1990s are in search of intertextuality, while the latest period is in search of the voice between these three points.

Croatian war drama (on the Homeland war)

Edited:
  1. Anthology of Croatian War Plays 1991-1995 where she included 11 plays.
  2. Anthology of Croatian War Comedies 1991-1997 where she included eight comedies .
  3. Anthology of Croatian Post-War Plays 1996-2011 where she included 12 plays.
The anthologies and Nikčević's theoretical work on the topic are changing the usual beliefs that there are no war plays from the Homeland War or that these plays are not of a good quality. Her research showed that from 1990 to 2011 more than one hundred professional Croatian plays were published or performed, plays that are connected with the topic either directly, through a character connected with the war, or through allegory.

Theatre criticism

Nikčević edited a collection on essays in English Theatre Criticism Today as a result of three symposiums on theatre criticism that she organized in the Croatian centre of ITI. She published the first theoretical book on theatre criticism in Croatia, titled Theatre Criticism or Inevitable Companion, where she compared two different attitudes toward theatre criticism with a new definition of the genre. She is member of the American Theatre and Drama Society and was member of the International Committee of the American Theatre Critics Association.

Acknowledgements

Main Publications

Books (Croatian)

  1. Theatre Criticism or Inevitable Companion.
  2. What is Croatian Drama to Us?, Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2008
  3. Losers' Genius in Our Town, Zagreb, Faculty of Philosophy, 2006
  4. New European Drama or Big Deception, Meandar, Zagreb, 2005,
  5. Affirmative American Drama or Long Live the Puritans, Croatian center of ITI, Zagreb, 2003
  6. Subversive American Drama or Sympathy for Losers, CDM, Rijeka, 1994

Translations (other languages)

  1. "British Brutalism, the ‘New European Drama’, and the Role of the Director" NTQ, published by Cambridge University Press, 83/2005, p. 255-272
  2. "Csináljunk új európai drámát" Szinhaz, Hungary, July 2005
  3. "Wszystko ma swoje skutki", Dialog 1/2005. str. 122–135.

Articles published in English (selection)

  1. "Sanja Nikcevic: The Comeback of Political Drama in Croatia: Or How to Kill a President by Miro Gavran", in: Haedicke, Susan C., Deirdre Heddon, Avraham Oz and E.J. Westlake, Political Performances. Theory and Practice. IFTR/FIRT Political Performances Working Group. Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2009, IV, 379 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-2606-3
  2. "Croatian Theatre and the War 1992-1994", in: Dennis Barnett and Arthur Skelton, Theatre and performance in Eastern Europe. The Changing Scene, The Scarecrow press, Plymouth, 2008.
  3. "How to Impose Violence as a Trend?", in: Ian Herbert and Kalina Stefanova, Theatre and Humanism in a World of Violence,, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press, Sofia, 2009. p. 57–72.
  4. "Angles on the stage Religious Theatre in Croatia 1945-1989; 1999-1994; 1996-2002" in Europassion. Kirche-Konflikte-Menschenrechte. Rudolf Grulich zum 60. Geburstag, Gehard Hess Verlag bad Schussenried, 2006.
  5. “Actors Under Power”, Theatre Year Book 2003 Theatre Abroad, ITI Japan Centre, Tokyo, 2003, p. 160-167
  6. "Political Correctness, Identity, War and Lost Communication" in Lužina, Jelena Balkan Theatre Sphere, Fakultet dramskih umjetnosti, Skopje, Macedonia, 2003., p. 89-95.

Literature

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