Rate My Professor Emma Cole

Associate Professor Emma Cole is an award-winning scholar serving as Director of the Research Centre in Creative Arts and Human Flourishing and Director of Research for the School of Communication and Arts within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. She holds a Bachelor (Honours) in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Sydney, a Master's (Coursework) in Classics from University College London, and a Doctorate (Research) in Classics from University College London. Cole joined the University of Queensland in 2023 after her previous appointment at the University of Bristol. As an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Principal Research Fellow, she works across industry and academia as a dramaturg, classicist, and theatre and performance studies expert, with particular focus on the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre.

Emma Cole's academic interests center on translation and adaptation studies, especially the translation and adaptation of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, alongside immersive and experimental theatre forms. She has secured funding from the Australian Research Council for projects on tragedy and translation, and from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for her collaboration with the theatre company Punchdrunk. Her major publications include the monograph Punchdrunk on the Classics (2023), which won the 2024 Australasian Drama Studies Association (ADSA) Rob Jordan Prize for best book; Postdramatic Tragedies (Oxford University Press, 2019); the edited collection Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity (2025); a student edition of Women of Troy (2024); the co-edited collection Adapting Translation for the Stage (Routledge, 2017), shortlisted for the 2019 Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) prize for editing; and a co-edited special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on director Simon Stone (with Professor Chris Hay, 2024). Additional works comprise articles and chapters on Punchdrunk, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and Katie Mitchell, as well as the 'drama, reception of' entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary and 'Ancient Greek Drama in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century' in the Methuen Drama Encyclopedia of Modern Theatre (forthcoming). Publications for general audiences appear in The Theatre Times, The Conversation, and Exeunt Magazine. Cole is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and she is currently developing her own translations of Euripides' final trilogy—Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Alcmaeon in Corinth—along with a Beckett-inspired methodology for translating tragic fragments for performance. Her interdisciplinary contributions significantly impact the fields of classics, theatre studies, and performance reception.