European Research Council Starting Grant for Former Postdoc

Dr Berenika Szymanski-Düll, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School and now Assistant Professor at LMU Munich's Institute of Theatre Studies, has won a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) with LMU as host institution. In her ERC-funded project with the acronym T-MIGRANTS, she will be investigating the agency of nineteenth century European theatre migrants. 

Szymanski-Düll's ERC project is entitled “Crossing Borders: The Agency of Nineteenth-Century European Theatre Migrants” (acronym T-MIGRANTS). She will carry out the first systematic analysis of nineteenth-century European theatre migrants stressing their crucial involvement in processes of modernity and global entanglement within the theatre business. Focusing on three geographic areas (Europe, the USA and South America) the project will map and contextualise theatre migrations and examine the consequences they had on an institutional and aesthetical level. In doing so the project will make a crucial contribution towards a transnational theatre historiography and to our understanding of historical and contemporary discourses on migration processes.

Berenika Szymanski-Düll studied Dramaturgy, Slavic Philology and Intercultural Communication at the Bavarian Academy of Dramatic Arts August Everding and LMU Munich, where she obtained her PhD. Her subsequent career took her to University of Bayreuth, the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies and the University of California at Berkeley. During the winter semester 2018/19, Szymanski-Düll was a Junior Researcher in Residence at LMU Munich's Center for Advanced Studies (CAS).

Her research interests center on the interfaces between art and society. She has carried out studies on this topic in the context of the DFG-funded project “Global Theatre Histories” and contributed to the DFG Research Network “Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain”.

In total, ten early-career researchers representing a wide range of disciplines have now received Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) with LMU as host institution. Each of these grants is worth approximately 1.5 million euros. Submissions are evaluated solely on the basis of the applicant’s previous scientific record and the quality of the proposed project. Moreover, LMU offers the option of appointment to a Tenure-Track Professorship to successful grantees, which can be converted into a permanent faculty position, subject to a positive assessment of performance.

Further information

Please see LMU Munich's press release.