Dr. Emma Meehan is Associate Professor at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research.

She received her BA and PhD from the Drama Department, Trinity College, Dublin, where she taught part-time on the BA and MA programmes. She also worked as the administrator for the Arts Technology Research Lab at Trinity College to support the Digital Arts and Humanities Doctoral Programme.

Research interests include somatic (body-mind) movement practices, arts in health, and practice research. She enjoys working across discplines, including in recent projects that combine dance with health, urban planning and interreligious dialogue.

She was Co-Investigator for ‘Sensing the City’ and 'Strictly Inclusive', and Principal Investigator on ‘Somatic practice, chronic pain and self-care technology’, all funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She recieved a Leverhulme International Academic Fellowship to undertake research on dialogue through movement in Indonesia.

She is Board Member for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, DanceHE and the Association of Somatic Movement Dance Therapies UK and Ireland; and was previously co-convenor of the Performance as Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and a member of the Peer Review College for AHRC.

She was previously Postgraduate Lead and International Champion at the Centre for Dance Research; and is currently Ethics Co-Lead and supports 'People, Culture and Environment' at the centre. She also coordinates the international Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network; co-chairs the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, and co-edits the associated Sharing the Floor blog.

Somatic practices; Practice research; Arts in health and wellbeing; Transdisciplinarity; Cross-cultural dialogue

My research focuses on somatic practices in performance and wellbeing contexts, and how they respond to social, political and cultural issues. I am a practitioner-researcher so my research involves developing embodied knowledge through engaging with the practices of artists through movement training, assisting on performances and creating my own works. Transdisciplinarity and working across cultures are core aspects of my research.