ProfessorEmilie Pine

Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama at UCD, and is author of the international bestselling essay collection, Notes to Self.

Emilie joined the School of English, Drama and Film in the spring of 2008. She teaches and supervises student work in the fields of memoir, theatre and memory cultures. Emilie was founding director of the Irish Memory Studies Research Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com) and a former editor of the Irish University Review and edited the Special Issue on Moving Memory: The Dynamics of the Past in Irish Culture. From 2015-18, Emilie was PI of the IRC New Horizons major project Industrial Memories, a digital witnessing of the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report). Please see https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie for more on this project. 

Emilie has published widely in the fields of theatre and memory studies, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her most recent academic book is The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International theatre (Indiana University Press, 2020). Emilie is a member of the Advisory Board of the international Memory Studies Association.

As a theatre-maker, Emilie collaborated with ANU Productions on the Ulysses 2.2 project in 2023, creating All Hardest of Woman at the National Maternity Hospital; her first play, Good Sex, was a collaboration with Dead Centre Theatre Company, and was shortlisted for Best New Play and Best Production at the 2023 Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards.

She is the author of the bestselling essay collection, Notes to Self, winner of the 2018 Irish Book of the Year award, which has been translated into 16 languages. Her debut novel Ruth & Pen (2022) won the 2023 Kate O’Brien First Novel Award. She is working on an essay collection on rape culture, On Being Seen, to be published by Penguin in 2027.  

The Shadow Bio Note

I was incredibly lucky to get a permanent job at UCD in 2008 after only two and a half years of post-PhD short-term contract employment. I published my first book quite quickly, but then spent four years unsuccessfully trying to turn my PhD into a second monograph. Abandoning that, I took on a funded project, which was an honour, but I found the management workload a huge struggle. In the years from 2010-2018 I published very little of my own work. I grew as a writer through editing other people’s work, but began to wonder if I would ever write anything substantial myself. Over those years I also struggled with a combination of professional disappointment (being rejected for promotion) and personal loss (fertility treatments and miscarriage).

Two great accidents have happened to me during my career – first, the discovery of purpose and creativity through becoming a teacher. And second, the experience of working with and witnessing people with lived-experience of residential institutions. This work has been the most meaningful of my life.

Around 2016, I realised that I was hitting burnout, and I needed another outlet. Creative writing was not a calculated career move but instead felt like a volcano exploding. Writing comes with its own pitfalls – exposing myself on the page, the risk of seeking external validation, the loss of my academic voice – but it has also helped me to feel like myself again and to experience a freedom on the page that I used to struggle to give myself permission for.