Emilie Morin

Profile

Biography

Emilie Morin is a Professor of Modern Literature. She joined the Department as Lecturer in 2008, after a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2015 and to Professor in 2019.

She works on modern and contemporary literature and drama, and she has a particular interest in the transnational history and legacies of literary modernism, in historical contextualisation, and in the intersections between literature and technology. She has published widely in these fields; her essays have appeared in various edited collections and in journals including Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice and the Journal of Modern Literature. Her books include Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her current research focuses on the transnational history of radiophonic forms. In 2021-2022 she was in receipt of a Leverhulme research fellowship for a project titled ‘Radio Literature and the Radiophonic Imagination in Europe, 1924-1939.’

Departmental roles

Graduate Chair

Research

Overview

Emilie Morin’s latest book is Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), which she edited and for which she translated essays and neglected journalism on early European radio with Marielle Sutherland and Nicoletta Asciuto. Her other publications include book chapters and journal articles on modern British and Irish literature, theatre history, sound studies, European modernism and the avant-garde, and the monographs Beckett’s Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). She has co-edited Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and special issues of SubStance, International Yeats Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. With Lauren Arrington (University of South Florida), she is Series Editor for the Clemson University Press series ‘Modernist Constellations’. Her record of publications and projects can be viewed via the York Research Database.

Supervision

Emilie Morin welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD applicants interested in working on modernism, on modern and contemporary British and Irish literature more broadly, on modern theatre history, and any other facet of literary studies related to her research specialisms. She has supervised/is supervising doctoral research on a wide range of topics including: London minor cinemas during the long 1960s; Samuel Beckett’s critical aesthetics; Samuel Beckett and audience expectations; representations of Salomé in modernist literature, drama and film; ghost plays of the interwar period; migration and the contemporary novel; forgotten women dramatists of the interwar period; J.M. Synge and representations of the Irish peasantry; European drama after 1970 and intercultural performance.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Emilie Morin teaches modern and contemporary literature on our BA and MA programmes. Her research-led modules deal with European modernism, experimental writing, translation, Samuel Beckett, modern and contemporary theatre. 

External activities

Memberships

Recent external activities include a contribution to the Swedish Academy’s digital exhibition on Samuel Beckett’s Nobel Prize; talks on political theatre for the National Theatre, on Samuel Beckett for Poet in the City, on early radio for Pica Studios; and an AHRC-funded collaboration with York’s Centre for Applied Human Rights as part of the Development Alternatives network, which focused on the creation of an artist’s book by Bangladeshi artist Shohrab Jahan, with collaborators from the Chittagong University Institute of Fine Arts (Bangladesh), Jog Art Space (Bangladesh), Makerere University’s School of Languages, Literature and Communication (Uganda) and the Ugandan women writers’ association Femrite.