Univ. Prof.in Dr.in phil. Johanna Zorn
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Academic Co-Director
Doktoratskolleg
E: johanna.zorn@moz.ac.at
Johanna Zorn has been Professor of Performance and Theatre Studies at the Mozarteum University Salzburg since May 2025. She works at the intersection of theatre, literature, media and cultural studies. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and theory of performative arts, intermedial constellations of the arts, relational epistemes of the aesthetic, and the relationship between political and artistic forms of staging.
After studying comparative literature, philosophy and musicology in Innsbruck, Aix-Marseille and Zurich, she conducted research until 2015 with a doctoral scholarship under the Bavarian Elite Promotion Act in the interdisciplinary doctoral programme ProArt at LMU Munich on Christoph Schlingensief’s last stage works (Learning to Die: Christoph Schlingensief’s Autobiographical Self-Modelling in the Face of Death, Tübingen: Narr 2017). At the same time, she was a lecturer at LMU Munich and the Innsbruck Drama School. From 2016 to 2025, she worked first as an academic advisor and then as a senior academic advisor at the Institute for Theatre Studies at LMU Munich. From 2024 to 2025, she represented the professorship for dance and performance there. In 2024, she received her venia legendi for theatre studies. In her habilitation thesis entitled ‘Im Maßstab 1 zu 1 – Ästhetische Episteme der Deckungsgleichheit’ (On a scale of 1 to 1 – Aesthetic episteme of congruence), she researched mimetic practices of excess from a cultural studies and comparative perspective. Her current interests in research and teaching also include relational epistemologies, aesthetics of duration and repetition, and collisions between aesthetic radicalism and institutional practices of protection.
Together with Silke Felber, she heads the Dramaturgy Working Group of the Society for Theatre Studies (GTW). Since 2021, she has been editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Forum Modernes Theater. Together with Berenika Szymanski-Düll, she is also editor of the Forum Modernes Theater series of publications.
