Current Project (as Co-Investigator, together with Prof. Pascale Aebischer, Dr. Karen Gray, Prof. Barbara Fuchs and Dr. Kelsey Jacobson) on “Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from Covid-19“, funded by the British Academy.

• Victorian Studies
• Travel Writing
• Literary Urban Studies
• Contemporary British Theatre and Performance
• Viral Theatre (see also Post-Covid-Art Conference)
• Narratives of Hope
• The Literary Essay

• Teaching project in the summer term 2025:

Interdisciplinary Summer School for advanced students and early career researchers on “Approaching Theatre Performance from Literary Studies and Linguistics"

See the Report here

• Contemporary LGBTQ* Writing
• British Theatre and Performance
• Literary and Queer Theory
• British Children's Literature and Young Adult Fiction
• Adaptation Studies

 Liedke, Heidi. Livecasting in Twenty-First-Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality and Engagement. Meuthen Drama, 2023.

Liedke, Heidi Lucja, M. Pietrzak-Franger, T. Radak. “Editorial: Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance." Theatre Research International, vol. 48, no. 1, 2023, pp. 2–8.

Liedke, Heidi Lucja. “(Mental) Health and Travel: Reflections on the Benefits of Idling in the Victorian Age." Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2023, pp. 97–117.

Publications (since 2019)

Link to ORCID

Monographs

Livecasting in Twenty-First Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality and Engagement. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2023. (Paperback edition published in 2025).

Faultiere. Ein Portrait. [Sloths. A Portrait]. With Tobias Keiling. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2021. 

The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 (Paperback edition published in 2020)

Special Issues

(co-edited with Monika Pietrzak-Franger & Tamara Radak) Special Issue of Theatre Research International 48.2 (2023) on “Presence and Precarity: Tendencies in (Post)Pandemic Theatre and Performance."

Articles and Book Chapters (peer reviewed)

“Ecologies of Care in a Digital Age: What Remains After Viral Theatre?" Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 13.1 (2025): 1-18.

“Against the 'Myth of Non-Mediation': Displacing the Aura and the Materiality of Live Theatre Broadcasting." Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading. Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen, edited by Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Martin Middeke and Christoph Reinfandt. New York/London: Routlege, 2025. 181-192.

“Hope As Form - Writing Hope in 21st-Century Fiction". New Conjectures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Ansgar Nünning, Magdalena Pfalzgraf and Anna Tabouratzidis.Tübingen: Narr. (in press, will be published 2025)

“Reading Characters: Reparation Through Reading in Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021)." Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Special Issue, edited by Dorothee Birke and Helga Schwalm). (in press, will be published in 2025)

“Sounds without Sources: The Broadcasting of Speech and Song in the Victorian Age and Distracted Forms of Listening." Transforming Victorian Orality: Articulating Social Change in Victorian Britain,edited by Anne-Julia Zwierlein and Katharina Herold-Zanker, Liverpool University Press. (in press,will be published in 2025)

“Working Out the Connection between Queerness and Ethics." Handbook of Literary Ethics, edited by Martin Middeke and Martin Riedelsheimer. Boston/New York: de Gruyter (in press, will be published in 2025)

(with Sarah Busch) “Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan's Every Brilliant Thing (2013)" Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 72.2 (2024): 179-192.

“The Politics of Queer Be-longing and Acts of Hope in Peter McMaster's Solo Performance A Sea of Troubles and Split Britches' 'Zoomie' Last Gasp (WFH)." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 12.1 (2024): 153–172.

(with Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Tamara Radak) “Editorial: Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance." Theatre Research International 48.1 (2023): 2-8.

“Thinking Aloud: The Essay on the 21st-Century British Stage". From the Scenic Essay to the Essay-Exhibition. Expanding the Essay Form in the Arts Beyond Literature and Film, edited by Jasper Delbecke. Gent: Studies in Performing Arts and Media (2023): 39-48.

“The Spatial Practice of Idling as a Bridge Between Victorian and Modernist City Literature." The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies, edited by Lieven Ameel. London: Routledge, 2022. 62-78.

“Transmediality and Theatrical Experience in 19th-Century Live Theatre Broadcasting". 19th-Century Transmedia Practices, edited by Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 62-78.

“On Being Pulled: Spectator Engagement and Spectacle in the Context of Live Theatre Broadcasting and NT At Home." Special Issue On Engagement, edited by Martin Barker and Sue Turnbull. Participations Journal 18.2 (2021): 294-317.

(with M. Pietrzak-Franger) “Viral Theatre." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1 (2021): 128-44.

“The Semantics of Surfaces: Victorian Panoramas, the Panoramic Gaze and Thereness.“ Victorian Surfaces in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Ulla Ratheiser. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 25-41.

“The Female Hipster as Emancipated Spectator: The Emancipatory Aspects of Representations of Female Hipsters in Girls and Frances Ha." Hipster Media, Aesthetics and Identity Politics, edited by Heike Steinhoff. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 235-252.

“'These Seats Are So Comfy': Livecasting and the Notion of Comfortable Theatre." Comfort in Contemporary Culture. The Challenges of a Concept, edited by Dorothee Birke and Stella Butter. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. 209-230.

“Emancipating the Spectator? Livecasting, Liveness, and the Feeling I." Performance Matters 5.2 (2019): 6-23.

“In Appreciation of 'Mis-' and 'Quasi-': Quasi-Experts in the Context of Live Theatre Broadcasting" Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts 13.1 (Autumn 2019): 86–102.

“Kazimiera Zawistowska's Poems in the Context of Symbolist and Decadent Writing." Volupté. Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 2.1 (2019): 39-56.

“Female Idling and Social Critique in Mary Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, 1843 (1844)." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 15.3 (2019): n. p.

Reviews

Review of Victor Merriman's Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-   Common. In: Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 11.2 (2023): 368-371.

Review of Pascale Aebischer's Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance and W. B. Worthen's Shakespeare, Technicity, Theatre. In: Shakespeare Jahrbuch 158 (2022): 213-217.

Review of Anthony and Cleopatra (NT At Home). In: Shakespeare Bulletin 39.1 (2021): 151-155.

Review of Marisa Palacios Knox's Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification. In: Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 21 (2021): 281-285.

Review of Stephanie E. Pitts' and Sarah M. Price's Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts. In: International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (September 2021): 1-2.

Review of Split Britches' Last Gasp (WFH). In: Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021): 225-227.

Review of Alice - A Virtual Theme Park. In: Platform 14.1&2 (2020): 179-182.

Review of Adrian S. Wisnicki's Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature. In: BAVS Newsletter 20.3 (2020): 5-6.

Review of The Tempest (Creation Theatre). In: Miranda (Oct. 2020): http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/28323

Review of Anna Blackwell's Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation. ZAA 68.1 (2020): 96-99.

Review of Matthew Ingleby's Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury: Novel Grounds. In: BAVS Newsletter 19.3 (2019): 2-3

Coming soon...