About: 

Lisa Peschel, Professor of Theatre in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York, England, has been researching theatrical performance in the Theresienstadt ghetto since 1998. Her articles on survivor testimony and scripts written in the ghetto have appeared in theatre- and Holocaust-related journals in the US and the UK and in Czech, German and Israeli publications. She has lectured and conducted performance workshops at institutions in the US and UK, in Europe, South Africa and Australia. Her anthology of rediscovered scripts, Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto, was published in 2014 (Czech- and German-language edition 2008). She is currently conducting research for a monograph, based on four postwar periods of Czech-Jewish survivor testimony, regarding the functions of theatre for the prisoners in the ghetto and the functions of the testimony itself in its historical context: Stages of Life: Survivor Testimony on Theatre in the Terezín Ghetto, 1945-2008.

Recent Publications:

• ‘Methodological Approaches to the Holocaust and Emotions’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2026; doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcag004.
• A Holocaust Cabaret: Remaking Theatre from a Jewish Ghetto, ed. Lisa Peschel (Bristol: Intellect, 2023). 
• ‘Theatre as Refrain: Representations of Departure from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto’ in Palgrave Handbook on Theatre and Migration, eds. Yana Meerzon and Stephen Wilmer (London: Palgrave McMillan 2023), 55-65. 
• ‘Survivor Testimony about Theatre in the Terezín Ghetto: A Longitudinal Case Study.’ S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 8.2 (2021), 38-57. 
• ‘Pedagogy, Performativity and “Never Again”: Staging Plays from the Terezín Ghetto’ (co-authored with Dr. Alan Sikes). In Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 26.2 (2020), 259-281.