Rate My Professor Caroline Wake

Dr Caroline Wake is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at UNSW Sydney’s School of the Arts & Media, Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture. She earned a BA with First Class Honours, an MEd in Higher Education with Distinction, and a PhD from UNSW, along with microcredentials in Supervising Indigenous Higher Degree Research and Developing an Indigenised Curriculum. As co-Lead of Australian Creative Histories and Futures, member of the Forced Migration Research Network, and associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute, her research centres on the relationship between theatre and history, including how theatre responds to and represents history, and how theatre’s own history is archived and recounted, particularly in Australia. She pays particular attention to excluded artists, including those with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, genres like theatres of the real, and organisations such as Performance Space.

Wake has edited key books including Staging Asylum, Again (Currency Press, 2024, with Tania Cañas), Performance, Resistance and Refugees (Routledge, 2023, with Suzanne Little and Samid Suliman), and Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013, with Bryoni Trezise). Prominent publications also encompass journal articles such as ‘Theatre of the Real with Resettled Refugees: Old Problems and New Solutions in The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe’ (Performance Research, 2019) and ‘Between Repetition and Oblivion: Performance, Testimony, and Ontology in the Refugee Determination Process’ (Text and Performance Quarterly, 2013). She has edited seven journal issues, including ‘Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis’ (Research in Drama Education, 2018, with Emma Cox), contributed over 50 journal articles and book chapters, and supported datasets for AusStage and digitisation of the RealTime magazine archive. Her accolades include the 2025 Joanne Tompkins Prize for Excellence in Book and Journal Editing, 2025 ADA Dean’s Award for Outstanding Achievements in Research, 2014 Marlis Thiersch Prize, and 2020 UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award for Innovation in Curriculum Design and Pedagogical Practice.