Erin Valentine is a PhD student studying performance studies at University of Texas at Austin. Her doctoral research focuses on performances of colonialism, looking specifically at how Irish American immigrants participated in the colonization of North America.

Her masters thesis puts performances in conversation with other cultural artifacts like government reports, documentaries, and public referendums in order to track how this century of abuse within the Catholic Church in Ireland evolved from an open secret to a national scandal worthy of political and cultural re-negotiation.

She received her bachelor’s in sociology from Princeton University where she organized a symposium on contemporary Irish theatre.