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 has wide-ranging interests in modern and contemporary literature and drama. She is especially interested in the transnational histories and legacies of literary modernism, in historical contextualisation, and in the intersections between literature and technology. She enjoys discussing unusual texts and authors who defy expectations, documenting literary lives, and researching those moments when literary and artistic creativity enters in collision with historical and political circumstance.

Research

Overview

Emilie Morin has published widely on modern and contemporary literature – in areas such as Irish studies, European modernism, theatre history and sound studies – and has been developing a practice in translation and biography writing more recently. 

She has worked on Samuel Beckett for many years, and has documented the artistic, intellectual and political contexts that shaped his writing in two monographs, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Beckett's Political Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and in numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her latest book is Suzanne Dumesnil, Suzanne Beckett (Cambridge University Press Element, 2025), a biography of Samuel Beckett’s wife, who was a writer in her own right and about whom very little was previously known.

Other current research focuses on radio and literature, following a Leverhulme research fellowship for ‘Radio Literature and the Radiophonic Imagination in Europe, 1924-1939’ (2021-2022). This research has generated publications such as Early Radio: An Anthology of European Texts and Translations (Edinburgh University Press, 2023; paperback 2025). This is the first anthology to explore early radio; it includes a large number of translations previously unavailable in English and sheds light on the work and lives of long-forgotten women and men to whom radio owes its artistic longevity. 

Recent book chapters and journal articles published or forthcoming elsewhere (in edited collections and journals including Modernism/modernity, Interventions and Modern Drama) focus on: literary journalism and distant listening during the interwar period; the radio pioneer Gabriel Germinet and the first attempts to write radio plays during the 1920s; Beckett in Tangiers; W.B. Yeats in the media; Yeats, Edward Gordon Craig and scenography; the avant-garde and machine dances; reevaluating the Theatre of the Absurd.

Emilie Morin’s work as editor includes co-editing Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), as well as special issues of SubStance, International Yeats Studies and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. She was on the editorial board of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui from 2015 to 2025. With Lauren Arrington (University of South Florida), she is Series Editor for the Clemson University Press series ‘Modernist Constellations’. 

Her record of publications and funded 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 doctoral research on a wide range of modern and contemporary topics. The PhD theses she has supervised to completion so far have focused on: minor cinemas and the redevelopment of London in the Long Sixties; Samuel Beckett and the limits of representation; Samuel Beckett and the idea of the uninterpretable work; Salome and the choreographic imagination from Wilde to Beckett; ghost plays of the interwar period; women, refugee voices and contemporary literatures of human rights; forgotten women dramatists of the interwar period; J.M. Synge and representations of the Irish peasantry. 

PhD projects currently developing under her supervision focus on: intercultural performance and European drama after 1970; representations of the London Irish; Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen and potentiality.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Emilie Morin teaches modern and contemporary literature on our BA and MA programmes. Her research-led teaching deals with European modernism, experimental writing, translation, Samuel Beckett, modern and contemporary theatre. She teaches an Advanced Option module on political theatre entitled Theatre with a Cause, and a World Literature module entitled French Autofictions, which focuses on prominent works of autofiction and the debates around autofiction.

Postgraduate

Emilie Morin contributes teaching and supervision to the Department’s MAs in modern and contemporary studies, especially the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture.

External activities

Overview

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.