Emma Cole

Dr Emma Cole is an award-winning scholar and Director of the Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing. A dramaturg, classicist, and a theatre and performance studies scholar, Emma works across industry and academia, with particular expertise in the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre. She has received funding from the Australian Research Council for her work on tragedy and translation, and from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK for her work with British theatre company Punchdrunk. Her monograph Punchdrunk on the Classics showcased the research emerging from her work with Punchdrunk and won the 2024 ADSA Rob Jordan Prize for best book. Her work with Punchdrunk was profiled in the New York Times here. She is currently working on her own translations of Euripides' final trilogy (Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Alcmaeon in Corinth) and a Beckett-inspired methodology for translating tragic fragments for performance.

Emma's research interests lie primarily in translation and adaptation studies, particularly regarding the translation and adaptation of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, and in immersive and experimental forms of theatre. Her other publications include the edited collection Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity (2025), a student edition of Women of Troy (2024), a co-edited 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 Geraldine Brodie, for Routledge's Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series, shortlisted for the 2019 TaPRA prize for editing), as well as articles and chapters on Punchdrunk, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and Katie Mitchell. Her pieces for a general audience have appeared in popular publications including The Theatre Times, The Conversation, and Exeunt Magazine. Dictionary and encyclopedia entries include the 'drama, reception of' entry for the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and 'Ancient Greek Drama in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century' in the Methuen Drama Encyclopedia of Modern Theatre (forthcoming).

Emma is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, a UQ Ally and a friend of the Reconcilliation Action Network. She joined the University of Queensland in 2023. Prior to this, she worked at the University of Bristol.