Emily Sahakian

Dr. Emily Sahakian teaches French and Francophone literatures and cultures and Franco-American relations 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, where she teaches theatre history and community-based theatre. Her teaching emphasizes experiential learning and collaboration. 

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 Andrew Daily, of Tale of Black Histories, a Translation and Critical Edition (Liverpool University Press, 2025). The play, Histoire de nègre, was created collectively by a group of schoolteachers under Edouard Glissant's direction at his Institute for Martinican Studies and performed for thousands of working-class spectators throughout Martinique in 1970-1. The 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

She is the author of a range of essays on Francophone Caribbean theatre and performance artists, intercultural and transnational theatre, and French stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

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