Program
Table of contents
Please note that the program is updated every Friday.
Current Draft of the Program (June 25 2026) (PDF, 272 KB)
Wednesday, June 24 2026
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16:00 - 19:00
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Early Registration
KOL E Main entrance
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19:00
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FILM
Tarjei Sandvik Moe: Catilina (Norway 2025) 45 Min.
Q & A with Tarjei Sandvik Moe
KOL E 21
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Thursday, June 25 2026
| 08:00-09:00 |
Registration
KOL E Main entrance
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| 09:00-10:00 |
Opening
Aula, KOL G 201
Welcome address Kjersti Rødsmoen (Norwegian Ambassador, Bern)
Welcome address Michael Schaepman (President of the University Zurich)
Welcome address Frode Helland (President of the International Ibsen Committee)
Introduction Klaus Müller-Wille (Local Organising Committee)
Piano concert Edvard Grieg by Michael Richter
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| 10:00-11:00 |
Keynote – Ellen Rees (Oslo): The Popular Origins of Ibsen’s Modern Drama
Moderation: Patrizia Huber
Aula, KOL G 201
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| 11:00-11:30 | Coffee | ||||
| Work-based stream | Thematic stream | Cultural analytic stream | Adaptation stream | Intertextual stream | |
| 11:30-13:00 |
Panel 1.1:
Rethinking John Gabriel Borkman
KOL G 212
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Panel 1.2:
Ibsen’s Families
KOL G 217
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Panel. 1.3:
Philosophizing Ibsen
KOL G 220
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Panel 1.4:
The Pop-Cultural Ibsen
KOL G 222
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Panel 1.5:
Ibsen as intertext I: The C20 Drama
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Klaus Müller-Wille | Olivia Noble Gunn | Frode Helland | Clemens Räthel | Linnea E. Timmermann Buerskogen |
| 11:30-12:00 | Lisbeth P. Wærp (Tromsø, Norway): Ibsen’s Borkman | Ethan Bjelland Hagberg (Seattle, USA): Orienting Hedvig in the Family Ideal: Vildanden’s Queer Generations | David Heckerl (Nova Scotia, Canada): Nora’s Untold Want: A Fresh Reflection on Ibsen’s Philosophical Currency | Camilla Storskog (Milan, Italy): Of Doctors and Drawings. Strategies of Representation in Javi Rey’s Graphic Novel Adaptation of En Folkefiende | Chen Liang (Shanghai, China): Performative Interpretation and Adaptation of Ibsenism in Thunderstorm |
| 12:00-12:30 | Lars Harald Storebø (Bodø, Norway): “It was an icy hand of ore, which took him to heart.” An ecocritial reading focusing on the final scenes in John Gabriel Borkman (1896) | Joachim Schiedermair (München, Germany): Apotropaic Families. Ibsen's Inversion of Freud's Family Romance | Anežka Matěnová (Prague, Czech Republic): Ibsen, Individualism and Vitalism | Kwok-kan Tam (Hong Kong, China): Ibsenian Politics in the Chinese Popular Imaginary | Carmen Vind Jensen (Copenhagen, Denmark): Norwegianness and Ibsen’s legacy |
| 12:30-13:00 | Farid Manouchehrian (Oslo, Norway): Bergman's Saraband as a Fragmented Adaptation of Ibsen's Plays | Ana Tomljenović (Zagreb, Croatia): Ironic existence: from Plato to Ibsen | Aleksandra Wilkus (Poznań, Poland): Ibsen in the Pop-cultural Mirror: Form and Figure in Dom Lalki (Poznań, 2012) | Benedikts Kalnačs (Riga, Latvia): Realism in Ibsen and Brecht: Between the Pillars of Society and the Good Person | |
| 13:00-14:00 | Lunch | ||||
| 14:00-15:30 |
Panel 2.1:
A Doll’s House on the Contemporary Stage
KOL G 212
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Panel 2.2:
Ibsen’s Houses
KOL G 217
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Panel 2.3:
Enacting Law, Enacting Transgression
KOL G 220
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Panel 2.4:
Ibsen in Film History
KOL G 222
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Panel 2.5:
Ibsen as Intertext II
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman | Ellen Rees | Giuliano D’Amico | Thor Holt | Alexia Panagiotidis |
| 14:00-14:30 | Hanna Rinderle (Berlin, Germany): From Nora to Niru. Retelling A Doll’s House in a Postcolonial Context | Rixt Josefien Bilker (Oslo, Norway): “This f*cking house!” Simon Stone’s Ibsen Huis (2017) as a Pastiche of Ibsen’s Uncanny Home | Heidi Leclaire-Karlsen (Oslo, Norway): From Pillars of Society and Harald Thaulow’s Pillars of Society in Prose to An Enemy of the People: The Emergence of an Early Whistleblower Figure | Helge Rønning (Oslo, Norway): Ibsen, du Maurier, and Hitchcock | Asztalos Veronka Örsike (Târgu Mureș , Romania): The Hungarian followers of Ibsen and their authentic vision |
| 14:30-15:00 | Sumaiya Swati Udita (Bangladesh/Oslo): Negotiating Bangladeshi Women’s Socio-political Struggles through Ninaad, a Bengali Adaptation of A Doll’s House | Eylem Ejder (Istanbul, Turkiye): Constructing a Gecekondu with Ibsen: Architectural Imaginations for New Dramatic Forms | Dag Michalsen (Oslo, Norway): Law and Normative Transgressions in Ibsen’s Dramas | Anna Stavrakopoulou (Thessaloniki, Greece): From the Periphery to the Center: Common Themes between Ibsen and Lanthimos | Siva Prasad Tumu (Rajasthan, India): Topical Ibsen: Theatrical Realism and Social Reflection in Telugu and Indian Contexts |
| 15:00-15:30 | Ye Rulan (Shanghai, China): Echoes of the Doll’s House: Jon Fosse’s Nora and the Timelessness of Ibsen’s Legacy |
Anar Rahimov (Baku, Azerbaijan): Timeless families in Ibsen’s plays: A view to dynamics, structure and
family relationships in his works
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| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee | ||||
| Work based stream | Thematic stream | Cultural analytic stream | Adaptation stream | Intertextual stream | |
| 16:00-17:30 |
Panel 3.1:
Nora’s Legacies
KOL G 212
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Panel 3.2:
Theater Historiography
KOL G 217
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Panel 3.3:
Ibsen and the Anthropocene
KOL G 220
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Panel 3.4:
Unrealized Screen Adaptations
KOL G 222
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Panel 3.5:
Ibsen as Intertext III: Norwegian Literature
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Patrick Ledderose | Jens-Morten Hanssen | Sabiha Huq | Farid Manouchehrian | Christian Janss |
| 16:00-16:30 | Benedikte Berntzen (Oslo, Norway): Was Nora always alone? A Doll’s House’s Nora Helmer representing what has been named the sad reality of our time | Gianina Druta (Oslo, Norway): Tragedy and expressionism in the German-speaking tradition of staging Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts | Jan Balbierz (Krakow, Poland): Henrik Goes to Hollywood: Ingmar Bergman’s American Screenplay of A Doll’s House | Espen Børdahl (Frankfurt; Germany): A Distant Mirror: Solstad’s Dialogue with Ibsen’s The Wild Duck | |
| 16:30-17:00 | Feng Duan (Shanghai, China): Breaking Through the Prison of the House?: Repercussions of A Doll’s House in Contemporary China | Keld Hyldig (Bergen, Norway): Ibsen’s Archetypal Characters: Individuation and Theatrical Embodiment | Marta Calogero (Venice, Italy): Ibsen’s Animals in a More-thananthropocentric Perspective: Stories of Adaptation | Audun Engelstad (Lillehammer, Norway): A Doll’s House through the lens of Ingmar Bergman | Martin Humpál (Prague, Czech Republic): Idealism and Death in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Ørstavik’s The Pastor |
| 17:00-17:30 | Sotirios Mouzakis (Münster, Germany) & Clemens Räthel (Greifswald, germany): Digesting Ibsen: On Sivan Ben Yishai’s Nora Adaptation | Kayla Amity Hanson (Oslo, Norway): Radicalism, Ethnic Identity, and the premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, 1882 | Mateusz Kucab (Krakow): Environmental Disobedience? Henry David Thoreau’s and Henrik Ibsen’s Anatomies of Ecological Resistance | Thor Holt (Oslo, Norway): Dreyer’s Unmade Adaptation of Brand | Katarzyna Mackala (Gdansk/Wroclaw, Poland):
Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Finn Alnæs’ Koloss |
| 18:00 |
Apéro
RAA Lichthof
Welcome adress Lars Løberg (Norwegian Embassy, Bern)
THEATER
The Lady from the Sea: Ballested's Story
The Theater elective class of the Schüpfheim Cantonal School / Gymnasium Plus presents a short scene from its interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s play. Directed by: Ralf Junghanns |
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Friday, June 26 2026
| 09:00-10:00 |
Keynote – Chengzhou He (Nanjing): Who’s Afraid of Nora? The Intriguing Reception of A Doll’s House Part 2 Across Cultures
Aula, KOL G 201
Moderation: Giuliano D’Amico
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| Work-based stream | Performance/history stream | Cultural analytic stream | Adaptation stream | Intertextual stream | ||
| 10:10-11:40 |
Panel 4.1:
Navigating The Lady from the Sea
KOL G 212
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Panel 4.2:
Ibsen’s Houses and other Dramatic Spaces
KOL G 217
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Panel 4.3:
The Political Ibsen
KOL G220
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Panel 4.4:
Ibsen and the Visual Arts
KOL G 222
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Panel 4.5:
Ibsen as Intertext IV: Nordic intertexts
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Gianina Druta | Rixt Josefine Bilker | Dag Michalsen | Camilla Storskog | Caroline Sørensen | |
| 10:10-10:40 | Else Barratt-Due (Oslo, Norway): The Lady from the Sea – a key to the mysterious in our own lives? | Annette Winkelmann (Skien, Norway): Architecture in literature, literature in architecture | Joachim Grage (Freiburg, Germany): Ibsen’s politicians | Ana Barroso (Lisbon, Portugal): Unlikely resonances: Ibsen’s Drama in Mathhew Barney’s Video Art | Gábor Attila Csúr (Budapest, Hungary): The Myth of the Complete Ibsen/Hultberg – Henrik Ibsen’s Dramas Behind Peer Hultbergs Stage Works and That Dark Matter | |
| 10:40-11:10 | Sabiha Huq (Bangladesh): The Sea is the Woman: A Blue Humanities Reading of The Lady from the Sea | Jens-Morten Hanssen (Oslo, Norway): The Dichotomy of Indoor and Outdoor in Ibsen’s Plays | Fredrik Engelstad (Oslo, Norway): Henrik Ibsen as a sociologist | Kamaluddin Nilu (Oslo, Norway): Text to Image: Widerberg’s Peer Gynt as Self-Reflexive Alchemy Within the Liminal Optic | Anita Soós (Budapest, Hungary): Ibsen Reloaded: The Relevance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in Merete Pryds Helle’s novel Nora | |
| 11:10-11:40 | Alexia Panagiotidis (Zurich, Switzerland/Odense): The Sea as Problem in Drama. The emergence of epic drama in Henrik Ibsen’s Fruen fra Havet (1888) through the lens of Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic tale Den lille Havfrue (1838) | Yang Jie (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia): Spatial Metaphor and Visual Transposition: The “Attic” and the “Depths of the Ocean” in the Modern Chinese Adaptation of The Wild Duck | Charles Kalish (Berkeley, USA): AntiPastoral and Social Critique in Ibsen’s Problem Plays | Sara Paula Hoffman (Savannah, USA): Ibsen, Wild Duck, life lie, memory, domestic realism | Hanna Marrandi (Tartu, Estonia): The modernisation strategies in productions based on Henrik Ibsen’s plays in contemporary Estonian theatre | |
| 11:40-12:00 | Coffee | |||||
| Work-based stream | Performance/history stream | Cultural analytic stream | Adaptation stream | Intertextual stream | Hedda stream | |
| 12:00-13:30 |
Panel 5.1:
An Enemy of the People on the Contemporary Stage 1
KOL G 212
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Panel 5.2:
Ibsen in the South Asian Context
KOL G 217
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Panel 5.3:
History in Ibsen’s Plays
KOL G 220
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Panel 5.4:
Translating Ibsen
KOL G 222
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Panel 5.5:
Ibsen in Dialogue with his Contemporaries
KOL G 210
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Panel 5.6:
Troubling Hedda Gabler 1
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Heidi Leclaire-Karlsen |
Anna Katharina Richter
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Lena Rohrbach | Nina Marie Evensen | Keld Hyldig | Lisbeth P. Wærp |
| 12:00-12:30 | Burç İdem Dinçel (Dublin, Ireland): Thomas Ostermeier’s An Enemy of the People Revisited: Dramaturgical Dialectics in Istanbul | B Ananthakrishnan (Kerala, India): Locating new Subjects for Playwriting in Malayalam: Ibsen as a Model | Solenne Guyot (Strasbourg, France): Medieval allusions and modern feuds: familial collapse in Ibsen’s plays | Linnea E. Timmermann Buerskogen (Oslo, Norway): Impossible Stage Directions in Når vi døde vågner (1899) | Knut Ove Arntzen (Bergen, Norway): Henrik Ibsen and inspiration from the North: Emilie Zogbaum | Andy Cooper (London, Great Britain): Directing Hedda Gabler for the Royal Shakespeare Company |
| 12:30-13:00 | Patrick Ledderose (München, Germany): Staging ‘the many’: Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People | Venkata Naresh Burla (Jharkhand, India): Navigating Moral Conflicts and Cultural Translation: The Impact of Ibsen’s Dramaturgy on Indian Adaptations | Roland Lysell (Stockholm, Sweden): The Vikings at Helgeland – a draft? | Kirsten E. Shepherd (Oxford, Great Britain) & Tzen Sam (Oxford, Great Britain): Model v Artist: The Question of Artistic Responsibility in Three Plays by Henrik Ibsen and Laura Kieler | Ayla Bayram (Kayseri, Turkiye): Plastic Modernities: Mungan’s A Woman Called Hedda Gabler as a CrossCultural Rewriting of Ibsen | |
| 13:00-13:30 | Ewa Partyga (Warsaw, Poland): Experimenting with An Enemy of People in Polish Political Landscape | Julia A. Walker (St. Louis, USA): Ibsen and the Legacy of the World-Historical Present | Thomas Austenfeld (Fribourg, Switzerland): Lincoln’s Assassination—Seen from Abroad | Huang Fangling (Shanghai, China): Humanity from Disorientation to Awakening: A CrossMedia Theater Experiment in the Era of Technological Accelerationism. Huang Fangling’s New Work Anna Gabler as a Contemporary Interpretation of Ibsen | ||
| 13:30-14:30 | Lunch | |||||
| 14:30-15:30 |
Keynote – Sandro Zanetti (Zürich): The Murderer of His Own Creations. Ibsen in Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama
Aula, KOL G 201
Moderation: Lena Rohrbach
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| 15:30-16:00 | Coffee | |||||
| Work-based stream | Performance/history stream | Cultural analytic stream | Adaptation stream | Hedda stream | ||
| 16:00-17:30 |
Panel 6.1:
An Enemy of the People on the Contemporary Stage II
KOL G 212
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Panel 6.2:
Germany and America
KOL G 217
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Panel 6.3:
Thinking Genre with Ibsen – Ibsen’s Poetry
KOL G 220
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Panel 6.4:
Moving Boundaries in Contemporary Performance
KOL G 222
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Panel 6.5:
Troubling Hedda Gabler II
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Anna Stavrakopoulou | Kayla Amity Hanson | Thomas Austenfeld | Liyang Xia | Solenne Guyot | |
| 16:00-16:30 | Lada Čale Feldman (Zagreb, Croatia): On being outvoted: the topicality of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for the attempt to define „deliberative dramaturgy“ as a subgenre | Ruth Schor (Tel Aviv, Israel/ Munich, Germany): Female bonding in the city space: Ibsen and Munich’s female cultural figures | Ralph Müller (Fribourg, Switzerland): Henrik Ibsen’s poem Ballonbrev til en svensk dame, journalistic purposes and non-fictional elements | Monica Emilie Herstad (Oslo, Norway): Movements of modernism at play | Patrizia Huber (Zurich, Switzerland): Queering Hedda Gabler: A Transliterary Reading | |
| 16:30-17:00 | Victor Castellani (Denver, USA): The People and Its Enemies: Influencers and Targets in Ibsen— and Resisters | Helen T. Mariam Gebreamlak (London, Great Britain) & Natalie Schmidt (London, Great Britain): Staging Hedda Gabler in the Contemporary United States | Kirsten Anne Stirling (Lausanne, Switzerland): “Jeg vandrer i mit eget Galleri”: Ibsen’s Madonnas and Poetic Form | Lianna Torres (Seattle, USA): Dancing Ibsen: Exploring Silence and Topicality in Marit Moum Aune’s Contemporary Ballet Trilogy | Olivia Noble Gunn (Seattle, USA): “No, no you’re wrong …. that’s a dated idea … of sexuality”: Masochism and the Question of Progress in Hedda Gabler and Babygirl | |
| 17:00-17:30 | Subah Binte Ahsan (Exeter, Great Britain): Ephemerality and Afterlives of Performance: A Student Production of An Enemy of the People in Bangladesh |
Gaziza Omer Ali & Rezan Saleh (Oslo, Norway): Ibsen in Kurdish Context
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Hans Kristian S. Rustad (Oslo, Norway): Ibsen’s rework of poetic forms: sonnets and desonnet-ization | Irene Pérez Puyol (Madrid, Spain): Voting, Speaking, Witnessing: Spectatorship in Àlex Rigola’s Ibsen Adaptations | Azadeh M. Isaksen (Oslo, Norway): Dog, Doll, Director: Ibsenian Echoes and the Paradox of Power in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (2024) | |
| 17:45-18:45 |
Business meeting International Ibsen Committee
KOL G 210
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| 19:30 | Drinks and Dinner | |||||
Saturday, 27 June 2026
| 09:00-10:00 |
Keynote – Barbara Weber: Staging Hedda Gabler – Conversation
Aula, KOL G 201
Moderation: Klaus Müller-Wille
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| Work-based stream | Performance/history stream | Cultural analytic stream | Thematic stream | Hedda stream | |
| 10:10-11:40 |
Panel 7.1:
Existential Challenges in Ghosts and Emperor and Galilean
KOL G 212
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Panel 7.2:
Cross-cultural Performative Events
KOL G 217
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Panel 7.3:
Thinking Gender with Ibsen
KOL G 220
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Panel 7.4:
Ibsen – Old and New Media
KOL G 222
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Panel 7.5:
Troubling Hedda Gabler III
KOL G 203
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| Moderation | Hans Kristian S. Rustad | Xiaomei Chen | Eliane Jaberg | Joachim Grage | Patrizia Huber |
| 10:10-10:40 | Kamilla Aslaksen (Lillehammer, Norway): Nihilism in Ghosts: Ibsen’s engagement in a burning contemporary issue | Song Jia (Nanjing, China): Cross-cultural Performative Events: The Adaptation of Ibsen’s Works in the New Century, the Aesthetic Transformation of Chinese Theaters, and Global Theatrical Culture | Dörte Linke (Berlin, Germany): Handicrafts in Henrik Ibsen’s Plays as Female Knowledge Discourse and a Field of Female Agency | Astrid Sæther (Oslo, Norway): Ibsen’s Satirical Drawings | Rezan Saleh (Oslo, Norway): From the Comfortable Villa to the Refugee Camp: Hedda Gabler, Turtles Can Fly film, and the Trajectory of Trapped Female Agency |
| 10:40-11:10 | Giuliano D’Amico (Oslo, Norway): Spectral Topicality in Emperor and Galilean | Ahmed Ahsanuzzaman (Dhaka, Bangladesh): Doing Hedda Gabler in Bangladesh | Frode Helland (Oslo, Norway): “Useful through use” - When We Dead Awaken as realist drama | Liyang Xia (Oslo, Norway) & Julie Holledge (Adelaide, Australia): Activating Ibsen Research with VR technology | Ágnes Teplán (Budapest, Hungary): The Abject in Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler |
| 11:10-11:40 | Christian Janss (Oslo, Norway): Friendship in H. Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean (1873) | Yifan Zhang (Shanghai, China): Re-reading Ibsen’s Catiline: Embodied Space, Femininity, and Liminality | Xujia Zhou (Zurich, Switzerland): The Attic and the Algorithm: Ibsen’s “Life-Lie” as a Precursor to the Modern Information Bubble | Xiang Dingding (Shanghai, China): If the Child Were Ever Born: Motherhood Reconfigured in Recent Adaptations of Hedda Gabler | |
| 11:40-12:00 | Coffee | ||||
| 12:00-13:00 |
General meeting
Aula, KOL G 201
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| ca. 14:00-16:00 | City walks Program (PDF, 237 KB) | ||||
Exhibition accompanying the Ibsen Conference
The Library of the University of Zurich is presenting a special exhibition to accompany the XVIth International Ibsen Conference. The exhibition will take place in KOL-G-204 and will be open from 25–27 June 2026 (until 13:00 on 27 June). Conference participants and interested visitors are warmly invited to explore the display during the conference.
