Emma is a dramaturg, classicist, and a theatre and performance studies scholar. She 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: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond showcased the research emerging from her work with Punchdrunk and was awarded the 2024 ADSA Rob Jordan Prize for best book on a subject related to drama, theatre, dance or performance studies. Her collaboration with Punchdrunk on The Burnt City was profiled in the New York Times here.
Emma's current research projects include an edited collection titled Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: From Narrative to Virtual Reality (Bloomsbury) and an invited chapter on dance, immersivity, and translation in Punchdrunk's The Burnt City. She is also working on her own translations of Euripides' final trilogy: Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Alcmaeon in Corinth.
Her previous publications encompass both classics and theatre and performance studies outputs, and include studies of plays, playwrights, and directors. Highlights include 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, and a UQ Ally. She joined the University of Queensland in 2023. Prior to this, she worked at the University of Bristol from 2015-2023.
Will is a lecturer in Chinese translation within the University of Queensland’s Master of Arts in Chinese Translation and Interpreting programme and a practicing NAATI accredited professional translator. Having completed his BA (Hons) from the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London, Will worked in Beijing at the British Embassy and then subsequently completed his PhD at the University of Queensland. In addition to Will’s teaching and research roles at UQ he is also a practicing commercial translator currently specialising in the translation of Chinese medical research into English.
Dr Wenying (Wendy) Jiang taught at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Alberta in Canada and The University of Western Australia in Perth before taking a position at School of Languages and Cultures at The University of Queensland in Australia. She is a specialist in Applied Linguistics, a graduate of Qufu Normal University (BA 1988, MA 1998) in China, University of Luton (MA 2001) in UK and The University of Queensland (PhD 2006) in Australia. She taught English at Taishan Medical University in China for more than ten years before switching to teaching Chinese as a foreign language in English-speaking countries such as the UK, Canada and Australia. She has been publishing regularly in the fields of second language acquisition, language teaching and learning, and computer assisted language learning (CALL) since 1992. Her monograph "Acquisition of Word Order in Chinese as a Foreign Language" was published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2009. Her article "Measurements of development of L2 written production: the case of Chinese L2" appeared in the journal Applied Linguistics in 2013 is a widely cited piece of publication.
