Franziska Trapp, postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin(DE) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE), dedicates her current research project to objects and apparatuses in the circus. She is the founder of the project Zirkus | Wissenschaft, initiator of the Young Researchers Network in Circus Studies, co-initiator of the Circus Arts Research Platform and co-editor of the academic journal Circus: Arts, Life and Sciences (University of Michigan Press). Trapp also works as an international freelance dramaturg (among others Tall Tales Company (NL), Sysmo (BE), Julia Berger (DE), Sing out Brussels (BE)). She was awarded third place as Young Researcher of the Year 2019 (Deutscher Hochschulverband) and received the Young Researcher Award of the German Association for Semiotics in 2020 for her dissertation entitled 'Lectures of the Contemporary Circus' (De Gruyter 2020 (DE), Routledge 2023 (EN)).