معرفی
Maren Butte is a Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where she has taught and researched since 2016. Previously, she held research positions at the University of Bayreuth (2015), Freie University of Berlin (2011-2014), and University of Basel (2006-2009).
Professor Butte completed her doctorate on audiovisual aesthetics of melodrama in 2014. Her academic journey demonstrates consistent interdisciplinary engagement with performance, media, and cultural studies, with particular attention to intersections between artistic practices and theoretical frameworks. She holds the title of apl. Professor (außerplanmäßiger Professor), a permanent academic position in the German system that sits outside the standard salary scale.
Her research focuses on performative practices between the arts and between art and everyday (media) life, body techniques and digital technologies. Her teaching emphasizes theater history, theory, and aesthetics at the intersection with media cultural studies: communicative and affective processes (staging, representation, performance), body techniques and knowledge, ritual theories (theater anthropology and transculturality), choreography, gender and fashion studies, intermediality, and transmodal perception (sensory studies).
Her scholarly output reveals evolving engagement with the ephemeral nature of performance, politics of visibility, and intersection of embodied practices with technological mediation. Recent work shows increasing attention to queer aesthetics, digital materialism, and politics of belonging in contemporary performance. Publications demonstrate sophisticated understanding of how affect operates as a medium in performance art and how artistic practices navigate disciplinary boundaries.
- Kuratoriumsmitglied: iDas (International Dance Artist Service NRW)
- Member: Gesellschaft für Theaterwissenschaft (GTW)
- Member: Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM)
- Member: International Federation for Theatre Research
- Reviewer for: DFG, DAAD, Tanzrecherche NRW
Professor Butte regularly presents at international conferences and has delivered numerous invited lectures on topics including techno-aisthesis, contact zones of the body, digital materialism, and post-melodramatic experience. Her editorial work includes forthcoming volumes on choreographic procedures and obscene scenes in performative arts.
