Robert Emmet Meagher

Robert Emmet Meagher is currently Professor of Humanities in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. He has held regular appointments at Indiana University, Bloomington and the University of Notre Dame. Across thirty years of teaching, he has held visiting chairs and professorships at numerous colleges and universities, including Trinity College Dublin, Yale University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Missouri, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Willamette University, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College. His publications include over a dozen books, as well as a handful of translations from ancient Greek (Aeschylus and Euripides) and several original plays.

For the past twenty years, Robert Meagher’s work-academic and creative-has been focused on the comparative study of ancient religion, literature, and theater, and in recent years has been marked by a growing fascination with the many and striking parallels between the religious, literary, and artistic traditions of India and those of ancient Greece. Alongside his scholarly work, Meagher, in the words of John Myles Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin, "has been progressively making a considerable name for himself as an interpreter, translator and producer of Greek tragedy, particularly Euripides."

He has been invited to give lectures and workshops on the translation and production of Greek drama for the contemporary stage at a number of colleges and universities, here and abroad, and has himself directed productions of Euripides at such venues as the Samuel Beckett Centre in Dublin and the Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri. Although he is an active playwright and in 1982 received an NEA Playwriting Fellowship, Meagher is better known for his theatrical translations of Euripides, most of which have been commissioned by Irene Papas, with whom he has frequently collaborated. The late Michael Joyce, of the National Theatre of Great Britain and the Samuel Beckett Centre, cited Meagher as "the finest living translator of Greek drama."

On numerous occasions, Meagher has extended his work in the humanities and the arts well beyond the traditional confines of the academy, bridging the concerns of the university and those of the wider civic and artistic community. While continuing to teach and to write, he has endeavored to create and support public projects in the humanities and the arts, such as the 1993 "Iphigenia Project" in Chattanooga, which Meagher undertook while holding the Chair of Excellence in Humanities at UTC.

More on Robert Meagher: 
Curriculum Vitae
Books Published