Associate Professor Emma Cole

I am a classicist, a theatre and performance studies scholar, and Director of the Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing. I work across academia and the creative industries, and have particular expertise in the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre. My work has been funded by the Australian Research Council, for a project on tragedy and translation, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, for a project with British theatre company Punchdrunk. My collaboration with Punchdrunk saw me work as dramaturg on their large-scale masked performance The Burnt City, as well as write the monograph Punchdrunk on the Classics, which won the 2024 ADSA Rob Jordan Prize for best book over a two year period. My current work includes authoring my own translations of Euripides' final trilogy (Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Alcmaeon in Corinth), developing a Beckett-inspired methodology for translating tragic fragments for performance, and writing a new monograph titled Greek Tragedy and the Australian Psyche.

There are two key strands that encompass all of my research to date. The first relates to the translation and adaptation of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, and the second relates to experimental, postdramatic, and immersive forms of performance. These often collide; I am paritcularly interested in how we can spatialise Greek tragedy in immersive theatre, and how we can communicate cannonical stories through abstract forms of image, sound, and affect in postdramatic theatre. Alongside my Punchdrunk monograph, my other publications include the edited collection Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity (2025), a student edition of Women of Troy (2024), a co-edited (with Professor Chris Hay) special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on the director Simon Stone, the book Postdramatic Tragedies (OUP, 2019), and the co-edited collection Adapting Translation for the Stage (with Professor Geraldine Brodie, for Routledge's Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series, shortlisted for the 2019 TaPRA prize for editing). I have also published articles and chapters on Punchdrunk, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and Katie Mitchell.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, a UQ Ally and a friend of the Reconcilliation Action Network. I joined the University of Queensland in 2023, and previously worked at the University of Bristol.