Emma is a dramaturg, classicist, and a theatre and performance studies scholar. She works across industry and academia, with her area of expertise lying 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, as well as from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, via a UKRI Innovation Fellowship for her work with British theatre company Punchdrunk. The latter fellowship built upon her work with Punchdrunk on Kabeiroi (2017) and supported her work as dramaturg on Punchdrunk's The Burnt City (2022-23). 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 published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. It 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.
Other current research projects include an edited collection titled Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: From Narrative to Virtual Reality (Bloomsbury), a translation of Euripides' final trilogy, 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 monograph 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.
