Professor
UCD School of English Drama Film
Emilie is Professor of Modern Drama at UCD School of English, Drama and Film, and author of the No.1 non-fiction bestseller Notes to Self. Her main research interests are in the interdisciplinary study of modern Irish culture, with a specific focus on witnessing, memory and trauma studies, theatre and film.
Emillie's book Notes to Self has received international acclaim and won An Post Book of the Year in 2018. This series of essays addressed the things that we often don't speak about, including fertility, feminism, sexual violence and depression. She went on to publish her first novel Ruth & Pen in 2022 and was named one of The Guardian's 10 best debut novelists.
The founding Director of the Irish Memory Studies Research Network, she has also published widely in the fields of memory studies and theatre. In her recent book The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International theatre, she explores how memory is performed by analysing the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history, and focusing on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience.
We often feel like imposters, and imposter syndrome is a useful label to show us that we're not alone in this feeling. But it is equally important to remember that we are not imposters, it is the system that is unequal.
In 2018, Emilie was appointed as an advisor to the Minister for Children and Youth, working on how to use the arts to respond to Ireland’s history of institutional abuse.
She received a UCD Research Impact Case Study Award in 2019 for her work communicating the legacy of child abuse in Ireland. Her studies combined humanities-led inquiry and digital technologies to examine the scale and complexity of institutional abuse in Ireland.
In the Industrial Memories project she used digital analysis to generate new insights into the Ryan Report, which details Ireland’s legacy of institutional child abuse. A unique Arts-STEM collaboration, the project makes this important document of Irish history accessible to others and has revealed new insights into the Report. It has also underlined how digital humanities can help address complex social, historical and artistic questions.
Emilie collaborated with Dr Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh and the Christine Buckley Support and Education Centre for Survivors of Institutional Abuse on Survivor’s Stories, a collection of the recorded stories/transcripts of some survivors of residential institutions for women and children in Ireland. These recordings are now housed in the National Folklore Collection at UCD.
Emilie was also writer-in-residence at the National Maternity Hospital in 2020. This resulted in the site-specific production All Hardest of Woman, which featured testimonies of the staff, patients and family members who have used the hospital, and highlighted some of the biggest issues and challenges currently facing Irish maternity services.
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the international Memory Studies Association and Series Editor of the Gender and Commemoration UCD Scholarcast Series 8.