Centre Director of Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing
Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Director of Research of School of Communication and Arts
School of Communication and Arts
Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Availability:
Available for supervision
Media expert
Associate Professor 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 (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), 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.
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.