NOMIS researcher Juliane Vogel and members of her research group have edited a new open-access book exploring how tragedy’s formal features have impacted its travels, and how these travels have shaped its forms. The volume, published by Bloomsbury, covers a broad historical spectrum from Greek Antiquity to the 21st century.
The NOMIS-supported project Traveling Forms led by Juliane Vogel at the University of Konstanz, Germany, researches the mobility and circulation of forms within and between cultures, present and past. Establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between their respective fields, members of this group study a wide range of subjects: choreographies and slogans adopted globally in contemporary protest movements; the repertoire of neoclassical model’s poses and dress-forms that began circulating in Europe and its colonies in the wake of the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompei; or, centrally, the circulation of theatrical forms and genres.
Studying tragedy on the world stage
One of the group’s particular focuses is on tragedy — a dramatic form originating in ancient Greece, which, since its broad rediscovery in the age of Enlightenment, has circulated widely between European cultures. As of the second half of the 20th century tragedy has also entered the world-stage: Theater practitioners and authors are now globally adapting and developing tragic forms, and particularly rich cultures of its reworkings have emerged in Africa and Latin America.
An international group of contributors
The recently published open-access volume Tragedy as a Travelling Form: Itineraries from Thespis to Today takes a closer look at this history and inquires how the tragic genre has turned into a form that circulates in our global present. Published in the renowned Methuen Drama series with Bloomsbury and edited by three members of the Traveling Forms research group — Juliane Vogel, Christina Wald and Philipp Lammers — the book is the outcome of a workshop held in Konstanz that brought together an international group of scholars of classics, English, German and French literature, postcolonial literature, musicology, and theater and performance studies.
Establishing the history of tragedy as a mobile form
Tragedy as a Travelling Form covers a broad historical spectrum, from Greek Antiquity to the 21st century, and asks how the forms that make up tragedy have circulated across that period of time and, in turn, how the forms of tragedy have been shaped by these travels. The collection begins with the tragedies of Antiquity and then investigates the 17th and 18th centuries, from Shakespeare to Voltaire, as a laboratory for the formal transformation of tragedy, inextricably linked to the social and political changes of that time.
The volume concludes with traveling tragedies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Focusing on two former colonies on the African continent (Nigeria and South Africa), it explores how tragic plays and styles have moved across cultures in our globalized, postcolonial world, where they have taken on new forms and meanings that are no longer tied to a single country, region or tradition. In doing so, the volume establishes the history of tragedy as the history of a mobile form, from Antiquity — when the titular poet Thespis, regarded by Aristotle and other Greeks as the inventor of tragedy was reported to have traveled on a cart, taking his plays to wherever he went — to our globalized age, in which productions and rewritings of tragedies conceived in Cape Town or Ibadan travel the globe just as swiftly as those created in Stratford-upon-Avon, or Berlin.
Read the open-access book: Tragedy as a Travelling Form: Itineraries from Thespis to Today
Feature image: Tragedy as a Travelling Form was published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, in June 2025. (Image © Bloomsbury)
