Associate Professor Joint appointment with Romance Languages Dr. Emily Sahakian teaches theatre history and community-based theatre. She is jointly appointed with Romance Languages, where she teaches French-language literature and cultural studies. Her teaching emphasizes experiential learning and collaboration. Her scholarly research focuses on Caribbean, African diasporic, and intercultural theatre, while her creative research, often conducted with her students, combines community-engagement, performing history, and devised and interactive theatre. She is the author of Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (2017), a study of the theatres of Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, including production and reception histories of their plays in the Caribbean, France, and the USA, which has been reviewed in ten scholarly journals across a range of disciplines. She is co-author of Tale of Black Histories, a Translation and Critical Edition (2025), which recovers Edouard Glissant’s work as a theatre artist and educational activist, expanding our knowledge of his thought and legacy. She has published a range of essays on Francophone Caribbean theatre, dance, and performance traditions as well as French-language theatre history, from the 19th-century to the present. Her forthcoming co-edited volume, Theatre and Revolution: Global Perspective on Performance, explores the relationships between theater and revolution in and across historical, cultural, and performance contexts Her creative research bridges dramaturgy, devised theatre, and community-engagement. As dramaturg, she created a digital component to the Tale of Black Histories project, a website which documents performances and shares recordings of the original Creole songs, and she has been supporting Gilbert Laumord and the SIYAJ theatre company as dramaturg for their adaptation and professional productions across the Caribbean of Histoire de nègre since 2017. From 2018-2021, she was co-director, with Amma Y. Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin, Julie B. Johnson, Keith Arthur Bolden, and Kathleen Wessel, of the Georgia Incarceration Performance Project, an inter-institutional project to create and perform a new play, working with our students and partners from historical archives and the writing of contemporary incarcerated students, By Our Hands (performed in 2019 at UGA and 2020 at Spelman College), which received national press coverage and an honorable mention for the National Council on Public History's Outstanding Public History Project Award. From 2022-2024, she led a project with her students to create a new play, When Land is Gone, about Penn Center's histories and cultural importance, under the Willson Center's "Culture and Community at Penn Center, National Historic Landmark District" Mellon Grant, with community-engaged performances at Penn Center in May 2023 and May 2024. As Co-lead of the VIPR, Humanities in Public Life, she is currently working with her students on the preliminary phases of a new community-based theatre project in rural Georgia. Dr. Sahakian coordinates the Theatre side of the Double Dawgs joint AB/MA degree with Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and heads the community-based theatre initiative. Education Education: Ph.D., Northwestern University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Research Research Interests: Francophone Caribbean theatre, performance, literatures, and culture; African diaspora theatre and performance; intercultural, postcolonial, and transnational theory and performance; theatre and performance historiography; French-language theatre; legacies of slavery and colonialism; community-engaged theatre; theatre and education; translation for the stage. Selected Publications Selected Publications: Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2017) shines a light on a pioneering group of Caribbean women playwrights and reconstructed for the first time their plays’ international production and reception histories. While scholars have generally framed “creolization” as a linguistic phenomenon, she theorizes it as a performance-based practice of reinventing meaning and resisting the status quo, and thus expand our broader understanding of Caribbean theatre. Reviews describe the book as “essential for Caribbean specialists” (Modern Drama) and “essential reading—across all disciplines and languages—for scholars and students alike of theater and performance studies” (Bulletin of the Comediantes). With Andrew Daily, she is co-author of a critical edition and translation of Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories), a Martinican play created collaboratively under Edouard Glissant’s direction (Liverpool University Press, 2025). The edition sheds light on Glissant’s work as a theatre artist and educational activist by translating and annotating Histoire de nègre, a play he devised collectively with a group of his schoolteachers and performed for thousands of working-class spectators throughout Martinique in 1970-1. Her co-edited volume, with Logan Connors and Lillian Manzor, Theatre and Revolution: Global Perspectives on Performance (forthcoming, Routledge) explores the relationship between theater and revolution in and across historical, cultural, and performance contexts. The volume’s essays analyze theater and performance in times of revolution and engage with theater and performances as sites for remembering, transmitting, and repurposing histories and legacies of revolution. With analysis of revolutions and performances in China, Cuba, Egypt, France, Haiti, Iran, Mexico, Russia, the United States, Venezuela, and beyond, the essays in their volume engage revolution as a historical process expressed through performance and as an organizing principle for theater and performance studies. Her recent essays include: “Guy Régis Jr.’s Post-Earthquake Vigil: Keeping Watch on Catastrophe in And The Whole World Quakes: Chronicle of a Slaughter Foretold (De toute la terre le grand effarement),” in The Coloniality of Catastrophe in Caribbean Theatre and Performance, edited by Camilla Stevens and Jon Rossini, Palgrave, 2025. Co-authored with Karine Katia Bénac, “Père, fils, mari, amant : constructions des masculinités sur les scènes des Antilles,” Percées 12 (Fall 2024) : 1-18. “Édouard Glissant’s Decolonial Theatre Practice: Histoire de nègre (Tale of Black Histories),” L’Esprit Créateur 62, 2 (Summer 2022): 15-31. Awards, Honors, and Recognition Of note: Richard B. Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2021 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Public History Project Award, National Council on Public History, 2020 Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar in the Humanities and Arts, 2018 Service-Learning Teaching Excellence Award, 2016
