Dr Margherita Laera

Dr Margherita Laera is Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Architecture, with responsibility for Knowledge Exchange, Civic Engagement and Partnerships. She was formerly the Director of Research and Innovation for the School of Arts (2023–24) and then for the School of Arts and Architecture (2024–25). Margherita joined Kent in 2012 as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.

Dr Laera is currently a member of the University of Kent’s Senate (2025–28), Civic Engagement Advisory Board, Sanctuary Steering Group, Right to Food Steering Group, and the AI in Research Working Group. Amongst other projects, she leads the School’s collaboration with the Food Foundation on the Bang in Some Beans campaign.

Margherita is an award-winning Drama scholar specialising in translation and adaptation for the stage, and contemporary European performance. Her current research concerns the ecosystems, cultures and practices that sustain or hinder the circulation of plays in translation and cross-cultural encounters through theatre.

Margherita is the author of three monographs: Playwriting in Europe: Mapping Ecosystems and Practices with Fabulamundi (Routledge, 2023), Theatre & Translation (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy (Peter Lang, 2013). She is the editor of Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Methuen Drama Anthology of Contemporary Italian Plays (Bloomsbury, 2025). Dr Laera is Co-editor of the popular series Theatre & (Bloomsbury) with Natalie Alvarez (Toronto).

Margherita is the founding director of the award-winning project Performing International Plays (PIP), which partners with Foreign Affairs theatre company to provide educational resources, teacher training and enrichment workshops for young people in secondary schools exploring contemporary theatre (in) translation. PIP’s mission is to make each pupil feel represented and foster intercultural dialogue through Drama by engaging young people with stories from South Africa, Egypt, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Cuba, France, Italy, Germany and many more. Winner of the Outstanding Drama Initiative at the 2025 Music & Drama Education Awards, the project has been funded by Arts Council England, the AHRC Impact Accelerator Account, and the Goethe Institut.

Before joining the University of Kent, Margherita was a Lecturer in Translation Studies at Middlesex University and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She studied Classics at Milan Statale University, Comparative Literature at UCL and Theatre Studies at Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle and Queen Mary, University of London.

Dr Laera’s research interests lie at the intersections of performance, migration, cultural studies and modern languages, exploring the relationship between theatre, cultures and ideology through the lens of translation and adaptation. She is interested in the way theatre and performance produce, disseminate or resist ideological discourses and beliefs around community, identity and otherness, and how cultures and languages meet in performance.

She has published on contemporary theatre and playwriting in Europe, especially in Italy; adaptation and translation for the stage; ‘classical’ Greek tragedy and its modern appropriations; multilingual, cross-cultural performances in Europe and the UK; and the role that theatre (in) translation can play in diversifying secondary school education.

In 2018, Margherita was awarded the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s Early Career Research Prize and the University of Kent’s Starting Research Prize for her body of work on theatre translation. 

At Kent, Margherita has convened a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules. Current teaching includes: Theatre and Adaptation (second year core); Making Performance 2 (first year core); Performance Contexts (MA); MA Dissertation, and others.

Before joining Kent, Margherita taught on a variety of Drama modules at Queen Mary, University of London. At Middlesex University, she taught core modules in the BA Translation Studies. Margherita is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Margherita has supervised several PhD students through to completion. She is currently supervising projects including: reclaiming autistic identities by adapting the classics; using Greek tragedy to explore youth masculinity in secondary schools; and inclusive approaches to drama facilitation.

Completed doctoral projects include: translating Minna Canth’s plays from Finnish to English; European directorial practices for canonical work; Sufi cultural influences on Grotowski’s work; dramaturgical practices by Song of the Goat Theatre; a comparison between theatre translation practices in Britain and France; staging theatre with young people for adults.

Margherita welcomes postgraduate enquiries for supervision in any of her areas of interest.

Dr Laera is a practising theatre translator and dramaturg, working on a wide variety of authors in multiple linguistic directions, from and into Italian, English and French. She has translated many Italian plays into English, some of which are published in The Methuen Drama Anthology of Contemporary Italian Plays (2025). Her translation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (2024–25) directed by Veronica Cruciani has toured theatres across Italy. Upcoming projects include a translation and adaptation of Jean-Luc Lagarce’s We, the Heroes (2026–27) for Piccola Compagnia della Magnolia and a translation of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw (2026–27) for a touring production opening in Sicily.

Collaboration with professional theatre-makers lies at the heart of Margherita’s work. She has worked with European theatre companies and producers, including PROJEKT EUROPA on a programme of weekly drama classes for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, PROJEKT ENCOUNTER, at Kent; with Good Chance on welcoming the itinerant puppet Amal to Kent in The Walk; with Fabulamundi on the playwriting exchange programme Playground; with Foreign Affairs on the Performing International Plays project with schools in London and Kent; with Suq Festival in Genoa on Performing Italy series 1 and series 2 creating interviews with Italian theatre-makers of migrant background.

Since 2021, she is a Trustee of Actors Touring Company, a leading Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation specialising in staging international stories by underrepresented writers.