Creative research highlight: Dennis Beck

The College of Visual and Performing Arts is proud to highlight the creative research of theatre professor, Dennis Beck, whose work as a co-editor on Precarious Identities: Theatre and Performance of Refuge and Risk in East Central Europe showcases the profound intersections of performance, identity, and cultural precarity across this vast and complex region. 

Professor Beck and co-editors Rachel Merrill Moss of Colgate University and Alisa Lin of Ohio State University note in their introduction that “[t]his collection of essays examines the historically-founded ties of precarity across the East Central European region, spotlighting the unique role of culture — and specifically theatre and performance — to speak to, enact, and subversively provide a locus for performing identity where none other could exist. Rather than focusing solely on the latest imbrication of the Communist Bloc, we instead argue through this broad collection that historicizing the shared heritage of precarious existence back across centuries enables a closer examination of the underpinnings of what we might consider theatres of risk that exist across the East Central European landscape; places that enable counternarratives at the sacrifice of their own stability, adding another layer of precarious existence.” 

It is the first collection on performance in this large region (Central Europe through Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania and east to Poland, Belarus, and Russia) that forgoes the framework of “post-communist” or communist era and is structured into five thematic sections with a short introduction to each.  

Currently under contract with the University of Iowa Press and slated for a 2026 publication date, Precarious Identities is entering its next phase of development, with Professor Beck and his co-editors preparing for the first round of revisions this spring.