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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.

Senior Lecturer Sarah Thomasson is a theatre and performance studies scholar and ARC DECRA fellow specialising in festival studies and digital humanities. Her research in festival studies integrates interdisciplinary research methods to develop new directions for the field. Her first monograph The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), brought cultural geography and theatre studies to bear on a comparative study of the relationship between these cities and their flagship festivals. An earlier 2019 article on the Adelaide Fringe for Contemporary Theatre Review won the Marlis Thiersch Prize for Research Excellence from the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies (ADSA) in 2020.

Sarah also led, with Dr James Wenley (Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington) a major research project to harmonise the live performing arts databases of AusStage and Theatre Aotearoa. “Building Global Relationships for Live Performing Arts Databases” (Nov 2021–Jan 2025) was funded by a Royal Society of New Zealand Catalyst seeding grant and led to the development of a transnational live performing arts database and the Performing Data in Australasia seminar series with Wenley and Professor Jonathan Bollen (National Taiwan Normal University). This work to showcase how artists use data in creating performance and how performance data is visualised within research has been further developed into Performing Data: Theatre Practice and Research (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) co-written with Wenley, Bollen, and Dr Mara Davis Johnson (University of Wollongong).

Sarah’s current research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, explores the network of international arts festivals in Aotearoa and Australia and how they work collaboratively and/or competitively to support the flow of cultural production around the region and beyond. She also has research interests in contemporary feminist performance practices and performance economies and her creative practice is stage and production management. In June 2026, she produced Don’t Look Now by Angie Farrow and directed by David O’Donnell at BATS Theatre in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington.

She is co-chair, with Professor Chris Hay, of the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies (ADSA) and an editor for Contemporary Theatre Review.