Emily Sahakian

Dr. Emily Sahakian (Ph.D., Northwestern University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) teaches French and Francophone literatures and culture and advanced French in the Department of Romance Languages and is the faculty liaison for a partnership between UGA and the University of the Antilles in Martinique. She is jointly appointed with Theatre & Film Studies, where she teaches theatre studies and community-based theatre. Her first book, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (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. The book has been reviewed in ten scholarly journals, across a range of disciplines, and described 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). She is the author of essays on Francophone Caribbean theatre and performance artists, intercultural and transnational theatre, and French stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her co-authored, with Dr. Andrew Daily (University of Memphis), critical edition and translation of Edouard Glissant's play Histoire de nègre/ Tale of Black Histories is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in May 2025. She is currently co-editing a volume, with Logan Connors and Lillian Manzor, on Theatre and Revolution (under contract with Routledge).