Dr Emma Cox

Much of my research and teaching is concerned with the representation and participation of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in theatre, film, activism and writing. I have published widely in these areas and I'm completing two books, Theatre & Migration (Palgrave 2013) and Borderlines: Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Arts and Activism (Anthem 2014).

I'm the editor of the collection, Staging Asylum: Contemporary Australian Plays About Refugees (Currency Press 2013), an anthology of plays that is the first of its kind to recognise substantially the role that theatre and performance has played in Australia’s ongoing cultural conversation about unauthorised asylum seekers, immigration detention and border control.

I'm currently developing a project on art and activism involving indigenous people and migrants, with an emphasis on Aboriginal Australian and Maori articulations of sovereign or territorial authority. I am particularly interested in placing ‘sanctioned’ indigenous performances, such as welcome ceremonies at state occasions, side-by-side with indigenous solidarity with (and less frequently, opposition to) asylum seekers and visa overstayers, in order to interrogate the way indigeneity circulates as an ethnic commodity in top-down statecraft and as a politicised identity that radically questions the state’s legitimacy.

I have an ongoing research interest in Shakespeare and Jonson in contemporary performance, particularly indigenous, postcolonial and intercultural theatre and film. I have written several articles and book chapters in this area, most recently an essay on a Kenyan Merry Wives of Windsor for a forthcoming book charting the 2012 multilingual ‘Globe to Globe’ theatre festival at Shakespeare’s Globe in London.

As an arts journalist for Australian broadsheet newspapers between 2005 and 2006, I published numerous reviews of theatre, dance and music (Courier-Mail), art exhibitions (Courier-Mail) and books (Sydney Morning Herald).

I co-ordinate the Performance and Asylum transnational research network at Royal Holloway, under the auspices of the Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research (CITPR). I'm currently the Associate Editor of the British Australian Studies Association (BASA) scholarly Journal, Australian Studies.