Anika Marschall works as assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she co-coordinates the MA Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy and teaches at the BA Media and Culture. Previously, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Aarhus University and worked as Assistant Lecturer at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow, for which she was awarded an AHRC-fellowship.

Her research is invested in issues of theatre, asylum and migration, socially engaged arts and activism, intersections of race, class and gender in contemporary European performances, diversity and representation in theatre’s institutional life, decentering knowledge and the stage. She regularly shares her work in different public forums, and she is member of the Critical Race Performance Studies working group (PSi), and the Political Performances working group (IFTR). Her research monograph Performing Human Rights: Artistic Interventions into European Asylum (Routledge, 2023) engages critically with contemporary debates on theatre and migration, and analyses artistic practices practices by Tania Bruguera, the Centre for Political Beauty, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Jonas Staal, among others. Together with Ann-Christine Simke, she is authoring a textbook on Intersectional Theatre Practices (Cambridge University Press), and together with Liz Tomlin and Elfy Ioannidou, she is co-editing a volume on Class Acts: Material Relations in Theatre and Performance (Methuen).

Anika is part of the network New Critical Theatre Studies, a platform for theatre performance researchers working with postcolonial, decolonial and critical race theories to exchange ideas, to work and publish collaboratively, and to organise themselves in what is still understood to be a ‘niche’ and exists in the periphery in the central European. The network offers tools and tutorials for a colleagues and students on intersectional approaches and postcolonial and decolonial theories for the field of theatre and performance studies. The network is currently working towards launching the new peer-reviewed performance studies journal Intersectional Theatre Review.