Emily Sahakian

Dr. Emily Sahakian teaches in Theatre & Film and Romance Languages. She teaches courses in French Caribbean literature and culture, Latin American and Caribbean theatre, and community-based theatre (with an emphasis on the techniques of Augusto Boal). 

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 co-author, with Dr. Andrew Daily, of Tale of Black Histories, a Translation and Critical Edition (Liverpool University Press, 2025), a play created collectively by a group of schoolteachers under Edouard Glissant's direction at his Institute for Martinican Studies in 1970. This book recovers Glissant’s work as a theatre artist and educational activist, expanding our knowledge of his thought and legacy. 

With Logan Connors and Lillian Manzor, she is co-editor of Theatre and Revolution: Global Perspective on Performance (forthcoming, Routledge), which explores the relationships between theater and revolution in and across historical, cultural, and performance contexts

Dr. Sahakian also conducts creative research as a community-based theatre artist and dramaturg. She is co-lead, with Dana Bultman, Patricia Richards, and Sharina Maillo-Pozo, of the VIPR Humanities in Public Life: A Multilingual Inquiry.