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.
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland (Australia), where he has chaired the Discipline of Classics and Ancient History. He has obtained 15 research fellowships in Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In 2022-3, he was a research fellow in the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (France). Associate Professor Pritchard is currently the lead chief investigator on a large project that is funded by the Australian Research Council. He is the author of Athenian Democracy at War (Cambridge University Press 2019), Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press 2013) and Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (University of Texas Press 2015). Associate Professor Pritchard has edited The Athenian Funeral Oration: After Nicole Loraux (Cambridge University Press 2024) and War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press 2010), and co-edited Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (Classical Press of Wales 2003). He has also published 65 journal articles and book chapters. Associate Professor Pritchard has an h-index of 21 and more than 1600 known citations. He has obtained the equivalent of 2 million Australian dollars in research funding. Associate Professor Pritchard speaks on the radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world. His 50 op.-eds have appeared in, among other outlets, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde (France), Le Figaro (France), Ouest-France, The Conversation (France), Kathimerini (Greece), Scroll.in (India), The Age (Australia), The Australian and Politike (Brazil). He obtained his PhD in Ancient History from Macquarie University (Australia).
