Theatre Across Oceans

“This book excels in innovative transnational historiography and historical network research. It opens up original and fascinating perspectives on 19th century Atlantic cross overs between cultural brokers and theatre agents, offering an impressive insight into the vivid global circulation of theatre industries. It reads like a stunning adventure!"


—     - Kati Röttger, Universiteit van Amsterdam


“In her superbly researched and elegantly written book, Nic Leonhardt puts centre stage theatre’s invisible players. She sheds new light on theatre agents as the protagonists of a global theatre business in the early twentieth century. This is an innovative contribution to theatre history informed by global history and a broad understanding of theatrical production in the context of a capitalist market economy, infrastructural, legal and technical innovations. For historians, it is a stimulating contribution to the cultural history of modern globalisation in a transatlantic key.”

—     - Martin Baumeister, Historian, Director German Historical Institute, Rome

Theatre Across Oceans: Mediators Of Transatlantic Exchange allows the reader to enter and understand the infrastructural 'backstage area' of global cultural mobility during the years between 1890 and 1925. Located within the research fields of global history and theory, the geographical focus of the book is a transatlantic one, based on the active exchange in this phase between North and South America and Europe. Emanating from a rich body of archival material, the study argues that this exchange was essentially facilitated and controlled by professional theatrical mediators (agents, brokers), who have not been sufficiently researched within theatre or historical studies. The low visibility of mediators in the scientific research is in diametrical contrast to the enormous power that they possessed in the period dealt with in thisbook. 

Nic Leonhardt is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at LMU Munich. Her research focuses on theatre history of the nineteenth and twentieth century and is strongly interdisciplinary and transnational in approach. Since 2016 she has been the senior researcher and associate director of the ERC (European Research Council) project “Developing Theatre” at LMU Munich, as well as director of the Centre for Global Theatre History.