Caroline Wake is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, a member of the Forced Migration Research Network and associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute. Her research focuses on the relationship between theatre and history: how theatre responds to and represents history and, conversely, how theatre’s own history is archived and recounted, especially in Australia. She has a particular interest in artists, genres, and organisations that have typically been excluded from Australian theatre history, including artists with refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds, genres such as theatres of the real, and organisations like Performance Space, a Sydney-based establishment that has been at the forefront of contemporary art since the early 1980s.

She is the author of over 40 journal articles and book chapters, including an award-winning paper for Text & Performance Quarterly. She is also the editor of three books—Staging Asylum, Again (Currency Press 2024, with Tania Cañas), Performance, Resistance and Refugees (Routledge 2023, with Suzanne Little and Samid Suliman), and Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press 2013, with Bryoni Trezise)—and seven journal issues, including a special issue on “Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis” for Research in Drama Education (2018, with Emma Cox). In 2022, according to Stanford University’s citation analysis, she was ranked in the top 2% globally in the discipline—the only Australia-based researcher on the list. Non-traditional research outcomes include producing a dataset for AusStage, the national performing arts database; working with the UNSW Library, National Library of Australia, and RealTime arts magazine to digitise RealTime's back catalogue; and honouring that same publication in a durational performance. She has also written over 50 theatre reviews for publications such as The Conversation, Guardian Australia, and RealTime, as well as two submissions to parliamentary committees, one of which she also appeared at in person.

Caroline is a passionate advocate for the arts and cultural sector, and often collaborates with industry. Three of her four Australian Research Council grants involve working with organisations like the National Institute of Dramatic Art, Performing Arts Heritage Network, Sydney Theatre Company, and the Arts Centre Melbourne. She also served on the Board of PACT Centre for Emerging Artists first as a regular member (2017-18) and then as Chair (2019-21). Caroline currently serves as an Associate Editor of Performance Research, one of the discipline’s leading journals, as well as on the editorial board of Liverpool University Press’s Playwriting and the Contemporary: Critical Collaborations series. She has also served as a Board Member of Performance Studies international, the discipline’s peak body, and Editor of Performance Paradigm, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to contemporary theatre, performance and visual art in the Asia-Pacific.