Current Postgraduate Research
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David Adams
Doctor of Philosophy
Maritain and Poetry in English
Suzanne Allen
Master of Arts (Research)
Spiritual notions in Garth Nix’s ‘Old Kingdom’ trilogy - Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen
I have chosen to study Garth Nix’s ‘Old Kingdom’ trilogy, comprising Sabriel (1995), Lirael (2001), and Abhorsen (2003), to focus on the texts’ spiritual notions, defined as the inner paths that deal with individual and social values and which refer to natural, cosmic and divine sources of power. The nature, function and value of the settings and characters will be examined. Magic’s role as a construction of meaning, the various root sources that Nix draws upon and that are embedded in the text, and the influence that the language has on the textual meaning will also be discussed.
Teaching
I am currently teaching and coordinating a level 100 unit at Sydney Institute of Business and Technology, which provides pathway courses for international students entering Macquarie University.
Publications
2005. ‘The proposal of a Stage One reading-groups timetable that integrates major comprehension components’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 28.2, 138-49.
Helen Appleton
Doctor of Philosophy
The Depiction of Landscape in Old English Literature
My research focuses on how the environment is perceived and represented in Old English texts and on the effect of genre and context the depiction of places and the function of landscape within texts. I use archaeological evidence as well as legal and geographical representations of places to illuminate cultural influences behind artistic representations, concentrating on Anglo-Saxon perceptions of ruins, islands and wastelands. I also consider the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon church and the representation of the landscape in religious poetry and hagiography, particularly in texts about St Cuthbert and St Guthlac, the poem Andreas, and homilies for Rogation.
Teaching
Various classes in Old English at senior and honours level and co-ordinator of ENGL 2657 Myths, Legends and Heroes in 2011
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Blossoms from Blood: Enriching the Land in Andreas’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds
2011. ‘The View from the End of the World; Geographical Representation in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, ‘Outlaw/ed Space: Constructing and Reconstructing the Medieval’, University of Hull, Beverley
2011. ‘Landscapes of Mourning: Space and Emotion in the Old English Elegies’, Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World, University of Western Australia, Perth
2011. ‘Blossoms from Blood: Enriching the land in Andreas’, ANZAMEMS Biennial Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin
2010. ‘Schadenfreude and Amusingly Shaped Vegetables – Ambiguous Humour in Old English Poetry’, ‘The Lighter Side of the Middle Ages’, Australian National University, Canberra
2010. ‘Beowulf’s Geographic Modes’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds
Mark Azzopardi
Doctor of Philosophy
Sophia Barnes
Doctor of Philosophy
‘The Future in A Different Shape’: Doris Lessing, Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dilemma of Representation
My thesis is a consideration of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City, informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose explication of the inherent inseparability of form and content in the novel offers an intriguing reconfiguration of not only the scope, but also the terms, of narrative representation.
In The Golden Notebook (1962) Doris Lessing anticipates and critiques a postmodern abdication of the political by embodying the dilemma of representation at the heart of this rejection in the fabric of her novel. The Four-Gated City (1969) is marked by a series of generic shifts, which underpin Lessing’s gesture towards an integrative logic.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Submitting to Chaos: Deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative self in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook’, AULLA Conference, Auckland
2011. ‘The De(con)struction of Convention: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook’, American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Vancouver
2011. ‘Resisting Interpretation: Formal activism and unstable authorship in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook’, International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference, St Louis, Missouri
2011. ‘Critical dialogue: Reading narrative shifts in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City ‘after’ Bakhtin’, XIV International Bakhtin Conference, Bologna, Italy
2011. “Narrative Politics: (Re) Reading Gender in Lawrence’s Women in Love”, D.H. Lawrence Society of North America Conference, Sydney
Publications
‘Stating the Problem’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the Possibility of Representation’, Doris Lessing Studies, 29.2 (Fall 2011).
Alix Baumgartner
Doctor of Philosophy
Messy modernism: the composite mode in interwar America
My project applies questions of aesthetic and narratological coherence to a range of ‘composite’ modernist American texts, including Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), John dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1940), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941). I consider the textual ‘mode’ in which such texts operate. I analyse the short story cycle alongside textual hybrids that exhibit formal continuities with the cycle, articulating connections between transmedia forms and exploring circulatory movements and flows of textual objects through processes of production and consumption.
Conference Papers
2012. ‘“O cant you see it, O cant you see it”: Barely seeable bodies and the composite aesthetic in Jean Toomer’s Cane, ’ Australian Modernist Studies Network Symposium.
Suzanne Bellamy
Doctor of Philosophy
‘Textual Archaeology’: The 1942 thesis on Virginia Woolf by Nuri Mass
April Bertels-Garnsey
Doctor of Philosophy
Characterisation in Old English Verse
My research concentrates on techniques of characterisation in Old English poetry, and the ways in which characterisation expresses wider textual themes. My specific focus is on the depiction of individuals and groups in Andreas, which I consider in relation to vernacular prose writings about Andrew, as well as the poem’s Greek and Latin analogues. My findings will also be considered in relation to an examination of Beowulf and writings about native English saints. By comparing characterisation in these texts, I hope to illuminate some ways in which the Andreas-poet reinterpreted a story about a non-English saint for an Anglo-Saxon audience.
Teaching
2011. ENGL2661 Imagining Camelot
Conference Papers
2011. ‘“Deprived of All Sleep”: Sorrow and Sleep in Old English Elegiac Poetry’, Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World, University of Western Australia, Perth
Hermine Biasci
Master of Philosophy
Familiarity of Strange Places: A Comparative Analysis of Anglo-American and Japanese Gothic Literature
Christopher Black
Doctor of Philosophy
Old Scandinavia in Finnegans Wake and Den lange Rejse
Why does old Scandinavia find so strong a place in the most ambitious novels of the Irish author James Joyce and his Danish contemporary Johannes V. Jensen? How did these two authors use this material in order to create new works of imaginative literature? This project aims to contribute towards an answer to these two linked questions. It will be argued that in both cases, the decision to include old Scandinavia was highly principled, and that both authors found it necessary to work out sophisticated methods for using their source material.
Jessica Brooks
Doctor of Philosophy
Comparative Conceptions of Freedom: Freedom in Eastern and Western Literary Contexts
Carolyn Burns
Doctor of Philosophy
The Adaptation of Plays and Novels into Twentieth Century Opera
Referring to adaptation theory and narratological analysis of lyric theatre, my thesis examines how modern English-language opera adaptations engage with national literary cultures. Examining a variety of British, American and Australian operas, I place particular emphasis on accounting for the contributions of co-authors in the composition of stage drama.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Stories About the Storytellers: Literary Biography in Recent British Drama’ AULLA Congress 36, ‘Storytelling in Literature, Language and Culture,’ University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Publications
2011. ‘Adapting the Undead: Vampires, Fidelity Criticism and Hammer Horror’s Dracula 1972AD’, Philament 17.
Andrew Carruthers
Doctor of Philosophy
Literary Scores: Desire, Ekphrases and the Object in Modern and Postmodern American Poetry
Natalie Clarke
Master of Arts (Research)
See Lawrence: Visuality in The Rainbow and Women in Love
Katrina Clifford
Doctor of Philosophy
A Literary and Cultural History of the Brother in Eighteenth-century Novels
My thesis revolves around the figure of the brother in novels written by women from 1750 to 1820, with two main foci. Firstly, it examines the way in which female novelists used the brother figure, and particularly the brother-sister relationship, to examine and critique authority structures, gender inequality, and a woman’s place in society. Secondly, it explores how the brother-sister relationship interacts with narrative form, and how a preoccupation with this relationship shapes not only a novel’s content and characters, but also its structure.
Teaching
2007. Eighteenth-Century: Authority and Anxiety
2008. 2012 Jane Austen and her contemporaries
2009. Eighteenth-Century: Scandal and Sociability
Conference Papers
2008. ‘Literary Scenes and Historical Blindspots: Brothers, sisters, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’, AAL’s Literature and History conference, Macquarie University
2009. ‘Brothers, Sisters, and the Idea(l) of Fraternity in Persuasion’, Chawton House Library ‘New Directions in Austen Studies’ conference, Chawton, UK
2012. ‘“His Sister’s Keeper?”: Familial and Narrative Authority in Novelistic Depictions of Brother-Sister Relationships’, ASECS, Texas
Publications
2004. ‘Elevating the fraternal into the conjugal: an alternative to the “incest” readings of Mansfield Park and Emma’; Sensibilities 28
2009. ‘Brothers, Sisters and the Idea(l) of Fraternity in the novels of Jane Austen’; Sensibilities 38
2010. ‘From reformed coquette to coquettish reformer: the critical history of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’ in Remaking Literary History; Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Amelia Dale
Doctor of Philosophy
Souls, Minds and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Quixotic Narratives
Eighteenth-century England saw numerous adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. These Quixotic narratives centre on the relation between the spiritual and the material – between the Quixote’s beloved text and the Quixote’s body, and between the Quixote’s fantastical ideas and the bodily reality that contradicts them. In this period the relationship between soul and body was contested and redefined; theories about what distinguished matter from spirit shifted throughout the century. My work demonstrates how these contradictory definitions and the role of the imagination in negotiating between the two fuelled the production of Quixotic narratives during the long eighteenth century.
Teaching
2011. ENGL2659 - The 18th Century: Scandal & Sociability
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Mad Readers and Moonites in Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine’, Romanticism Studies Association of Australasia ‘Romanticism and the Tyranies of Distance’ Conference
2011. ‘The Quixotic Imagination in Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine’, 4th Australasian David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Melbourne.
2011. ‘Souls, bodies and The Spiritual Quixote’, Reflections on Revolution and Romanticism Postgraduate Symposium of the Romanticism Studies Association of Australasia, Sydney.
2012. ‘Mr Shenstone’s sluices, souls and The Spiritual Quixote’, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 41st Annual Conference, Oxford.
Christelle Davis
Doctor of Philosophy
Samuel Dickson
Doctor of Philosophy
Postmodern Literature
Justine Ettler
Doctor of Philosophy
The Best City for Business
This thesis analyses the Second Wave feminist critique that surrounded the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’ third novel, American Psycho. It begins by identifying the major shifts in the literature and discusses them in relation to the feminist critique. Next the thesis challenges a number of dominant defences of American Psycho such as the ubiquitous defence of the novel as a satire, or the equally prevalent defence of the novel as postmodern classic. In conclusion, the thesis argues that a balanced assessment of the novel must first of all attempt to reconcile the feminist critique with the postmodern defence.
Jedidiah Evans
Doctor of Philosophy
“Looking Homeward”: Thomas Wolfe, Sehnsucht, and Fascism
This thesis examines Wolfe’s preoccupation with sehnsucht – an addiction to longing – and seeks to explore how this ‘aesthetic of longing’ is linked to his obsession with 1930s Germany, his indebtedness to German Romanticism, and his fascist politics. In doing so I hope to disentangle his writing from solely regional debates surrounding “the South” and highlight the broader significance of his work as part of the transatlantic exchange of myths.
Teaching
2011. ENGL2640: Shakespeare
Toby Fitch
Doctor of Arts
Theme Parks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Poetry
My doctorate will be half academic writing and half creative writing. I am currently researching the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé and their influence on and relation to certain tropes in contemporary poetry - from translation to mistranslation, from pattern/concrete poetry to what I like to call ‘absinthe’ poetry. I will be writing my next collection of poems around and in some of these modes, or ‘theme parks’. I will also be travelling to Paris to write and research.
Publications
2011. Dual Book Review/Essay, http://cordite.org.au/reviews/toby-fitch-reviews-michael-farrell-and-john-ashbery/
2012. 'Rawshock', a poem in ten parts modelled on the original Rorschach inkblots, forthcoming in http://meanjin.com.au/
To read more of my published poems, go to: http://tobyfitch.blogspot.com/
Nicholas Fuller
Doctor of Philosophy
Peter Gibbard
Doctor of Philosophy
Words that say more than they say: politics and style in Elizabethan drama
In late-Elizabethan England, there was a vogue for the sententious style of Seneca and Tacitus, which can be seen as a reaction against the rhetorical style of Cicero. This stylistic fashion was part of a broader European movement, which was closely associated with a surge of interest in Tacitean political discourses. In my dissertation, I explore connections between early modern politics and the sententious and Ciceronian rhetorical styles. I argue that in their plays, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson exploit the political connotations of the sententious and Ciceronian styles so as to express political attitudes and engage with contemporary political debates.
Matthew Glen
Doctor of Philosophy
Aesthetics and Subjectivity in the Novels of John Banville
Nicola Gray
Doctor of Philosophy
Cressida Green
Doctor of Philosophy
Female Rivalry in Victorian Literature
Stephen Greenall
Doctor of Philosophy
The Cult of Essentialism in Cormac McCarthy
My thesis investigates Cormac McCarthy’s southwestern novels to establish a nexus between their stylistic, political, and philosophical parameters. I examine McCarthy’s work in terms of place theory, as well as conceptual metaphor theory, though perhaps the most fundamental question remains his will to anti-interpretationism. If that phrase invokes Nietzsche, it should: examining McCarthy’s philological journey into the twilit liminality of his own distinctive narrative zones is nothing if not a Nietzschean enterprise. In narratological terms, I hope to develop in ‘hero theory’ an interpretive tool both for the construing of McCarthy’s people and for wider application.
Emma Halpin
Doctor of Philosophy
John Wayne: Real/Reel
My project examines the relationship between John Wayne, the American film industry and Washington from 1948 to 1962, showing how Wayne’s screen image contributed to the post-war construction of nationalism and projection of American values. The period studied in this thesis includes the United States’ rise to a world superpower during the Cold War, and the change in the production practices of the American film industry towards consolidation. It is also the timeframe in which Wayne’s popularity was at its peak, internalising the demands of the nation through his screen image as America’s hero, on and off screen.
Alexandra Hankinson
Doctor of Philosophy
A Life of their Own: Regarding Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
This project examines the way in which the Romantic discovery of intricacy and individuation in the natural world gradually led to a more complex and empathetic appraisal of non-human animal life. In particular, it considers the way in which the close observation of living creatures that was then taking place in homes, laboratories, and in the field encouraged greater respect for individual animal being and promoted conversation, both literary and scientific, regarding the properties of humans and animals alike. An evaluation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s representations of animals and organic form will constitute an integral part of this project.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘“Swallows interweaving there…At distance wildly-wailing”: Observations of Animals in Coleridge’s Notebooks, ’ The Romantic Studies Association of Australasia’s conference, Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance, University of Sydney.
Claire Hansen
Doctor of Philosophy
Complexity in Shakespeare: creativity and constraint in Shakespeare play, pedagogy and performance
Focusing on the application of complexity theory to Shakespeare studies, my thesis aims to explore how complexity theory – which has its genesis within science – can be developed as a valuable methodology within the humanities. My research will develop a definition of complexity theory for literature studies, identify how complexity is already at play within the various fields of Shakespeare texts, scholarship, history, performance and pedagogy, and explore how the application of complexity may enrich our understanding and encourage the development of innovative ways of reading, experiencing, learning and teaching Shakespeare.
Drew Harrison
Doctor of Philosophy
Wicked Problems, Weak Designs
Kay Harrison
Master of Arts (Research)
The Lost Boys: Un-ravelling the myth of the ‘heroic male’
My project investigates the role of literary discourse in creating and maintaining the myth of the ‘heroic male’ in the Australian national psyche through an exploration of six contemporary novels. It posits that continued dedication to the ‘heroic male’ has a castrating effect on dialogic masculinities in rural settings. This results in a legacy of psychological damage: a thread of lost boys stranded outside the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity who can only be reconciled to it in literary death, binding them to the sacred in nature, thus reinstating their hetero-normative masculinity.
Meegan Hasted
Doctor of Philosophy
Heaven and Earth: John Keats and the Romantic Revolution in Astronomy and Geology
John Keats spent his entire poetic career dedicated to an investigation of the mortal and immortal – the earthly and divine. It is no coincidence, my thesis argues, that this preoccupation with the nature of heaven and earth comes at a time when science (and in particular, English and Scottish science) was investigating the same subject with more precision than ever before. Advances in astronomy and the emergence of geology beginning in the 1780s and continuing throughout the nineteenth century, challenged how poets like Keats could imagine the universe. Both of these scientific disciplines, working independently of (and sometimes contradicting) each other, were concerned with challenging traditional associations with permanence and immutability – themes with which Keats maintains a persistent, even compulsive, interest in his poetry.
Teaching
Jane Austen and her Contemporaries
Victorian Literature
Conference Papers
November 2011. “The Politics of Eternity: Science and Revolution in Keats’s Hyperion,” RSAA Postgraduate Conference, University of Sydney.
July 2011. “‘Myriads of Earthly Wrecks’: James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth and the poetry of Keats,” BARS Conference, University of Glasgow.
February 2011. “Imagining ‘Heaven’s Brink’ in Endymion and ‘Bright Star,’” RSAA Conference, University of Sydney.
July 2010. “‘Things Mysterious, Immortal, Starry’: John Keats and the Herschelian Universe,” AAL Conference, University of NSW.
Scott Henretty
Master of Arts (Research)
Masculinity, Modernism and Conrad’s Nostromo and Lord Jim
My thesis aims to explore Conrad’s role in the construction of the unique form of hegemonic masculinity within modernism. I aim to define and utilise the archetypal fiction of masculinity in terms of determining the significance of the anxious and societally emasculated modernist masculine construct. Defining this paradigm as the ‘flaccid phallus’, I seek to observe Conrad’s position regarding this contextually viable notion.
Kevin Hewitt
Doctor of Philosophy
A critical biography of Howard Vernon (1848-1921) and his contribution to Gilbert and Sullivan opera in Australasia
Howard Vernon was central to the production of Gilbert and Sullivan operas in Australia, and created many of the roles, of either the comedian or what is termed the ‘heavy baritone’, as the repertoire was first presented by J.C. Williamson and his organisations over the latter part of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century.
He travelled in Asia, England and California as well as throughout Australasia and was significant in the development of music theatre in Australasia and part of its transnationalism of theatre throughout his professional career, which dated from the late 1860s until shortly before his death in 1921.
Ben Holgate
Master of Arts (Research)
Re-interpreting history: magical realism in contemporary Australian novels
Magical realism has become an integral part of postcolonial literature in English since the 1980s. This narrative mode has gained a global popularity transcending its original incarnation in Latin American literature in the 1950s and 60s. My thesis explores how magical realism has been used in different ways and for different purposes by three Australian writers: Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan and Alexis Wright.
Kate Judge
Doctor of Philosophy
Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: an Evaluation of Theories of Modality
Aashish Kaul
Doctor of Arts (Creative Writing)
A Novel on the Origin of Chess
Although myths abound as to the invention of chess in the East, it is unclear whether it originated in India, China or Persia. Referencesto a Chess-like game in the Indian epic, Ramayana, refer as far back as the fifth century B.C. Using the game’s development as a narrative strategy and a time period which is immeasurably remote, this project probes perennial literary questions – of desire and despair, the transience of triumph and the weight of failure, the swell of pride and the contraction of frustration, the sweep of providence and the jabs of free will.
Judith Kessel
Doctor of Philosophy
Re-reading Voloshinov and the Ideological Sign
Voloshinov scholarship suffers from misreading of the Russian thinker’s central thesis on the ‘ideological sign’. My project examines his seminal work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), to show that his philosophically motivated ‘ideological sign’ belongs to a central position in the field of contemporary semiotics. This requires a new reading of the English translation of MPL in light of the Russian original and, where necessary, re-translation that takes into account Voloshinov’s intellectual heritage and academic context. The dialogic word as an ideological, interpretant/sign will be shown to be integral to the domains of interpretation and aesthetics.
Susan King
Doctor of Philosophy
Disturbing Landscapes: Mapping Sydney’s Fictional Geographies
Dominic Knight
Doctor of Arts
Man vs Child
Tony Knight
Doctor of Philosophy
[[b|Richard Burbage: The World’s Greatest Actor]]
David Large
Doctor of Philosophy
Malcolm Lowry and Tradition
The thesis examines the traces of influence in three of Malcolm Lowry’s ‘major minor’ texts – his first novel Ultramarine, the unpublished novel In Ballast to the White Sea, and Lowry’s filmscript adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Using a range of critical approaches – genetic, annotation, and theories of fidelity and adaptation – the thesis accounts for Lowry's ‘poetics of plagiarism’, that is, his pronounced tendency to incorporate other voices and texts in the production of his own ‘new’ fiction and poetry.
Teaching
Tutoring at the University of Sydney
ENGL 1002 – Narratives of Romance and Adventure
ENGL 2640 – Shakespeare
Tutoring at the University of Otago (NZ)
ENGL 121 – English Literature: A Survey
ENGL 150 – Popular Literature: The Art of Crime
Conference Papers
2012. “The power and purity”: Sublimation and projection in Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine. Australian Modernist Studies Network Symposium.
2011. “If the story becomes reality, does the map become the place?”: The Unwritten as an intertext of the Platonic Library. Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand.
2010. ‘Omega Points: The Guiding Principles of Hybridity in Dan Simmonsʼ Hyperion Cantos’. University of New South Wales, Australian Association of Literature.
Anastasia Louridas
Master of Arts (Research)
Georgina Loveridge
Doctor of Philosophy
‘A Landscape without Figures’: Patrick White’s Poetics of Space
James Marland
Acceptance Theatre: The Staging of a Gay and Lesbian Religious Sensibility
Historically, theological heterosexism has been fundamental in establishing the religious segregation of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community. Despite adamant rejection from most mainstream religious institutions there has been a notable increase in gay and lesbian religious groups. One factor instrumental in bringing about this growth has been the critical authority of queer theology and its exegetical support for the religious legitimacy of gay men and women. The growth of a positive gay religious sensibility can be mapped through literature and theatre, where certain authors and playwrights have been vocal in endorsing the religious acceptance of the LGBT community. James’s research focused on five American post-1980 plays for their radical endorsement of a gay religious sensibility. These theatrical texts not only disrupt religious conservatism but also facilitate a greater inclusion of LGBT individuals in the practice of mainstream religions, especially those stemming from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
James has a full-time lectureship in Literature/Drama/Communication at the Australian Catholic University, Strathfield campus. He is currently (August, 2011) directing a performance of Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things to be staged for schools and the general public in October at the theatre on the Strathfield campus.
Patrick Marland
Doctor of Philosophy
Seeing things in Dickens: A Study of Vision and Hypotposis
Ailish McKeown
Doctor of Philosophy
Saints and the World in late medieval British Saint Plays
James McLeod
Doctor of Philosophy
The Situationist Alan Ball
My work aims to use the vast, elaborate and multifaceted theoretical and practical framework provided by the Situationist International to structure a holistic reading of the acclaimed stage and screen oeuvre of Alan Ball. My thesis accounts for the aesthetics, satirical techniques, thematic fascinations and social outlook evident throughout this diverse body of work. While a relatively substantial body of criticism exists around Alan Ball, all of it thus far examines individual works, as well as individual themes or techniques, in isolation. Mine is the first critical work to attempt a more unifying, suturing process with this body of work.
Teaching
2008. ENGL 1025 Fiction, Film and Power
2009. ENGL 2660 Reading the Nation: American Literature 1930s-1970s
Conference Papers
2011. ‘City Symphonies of Silence and Sound: Man With a Movie Camera and The Naked City’, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association/Southwest & Texas Popular Culture Association
2011. ‘Roundtable on Berlin: Symphony of a Great City’, PCA/ACA/SWTXPCA
2010. ‘Spectacle of the Dead: Situationist Vampires in True Blood’, Northeast Modern Languages Association and Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association
2010. ‘The Story of our Land: Wandering Voices in The New World’, College English Association
2010. ‘Corporeal Hauntings in Porter and Tsiolkas’, American Association of Australiasian Literature Studies
Publications
2009. ‘Narrative Vistas: Subversive Voice-over in Terrence Malick", Philament 14: 56-90.
Samuel Moginie
Doctor of Philosophy
Australian Poetry in the 1970s
The 1970s was a dynamic time for Australia – and for Australian verse culture. My thesis seeks to reappraise and rediscover key works and moments of the decade in poetry – and redress the rhetorics of conservatism and modernism that cut across it. At the moment, I’m interested in the Generation of ’68, Judith Wright, Pam Brown, Ken Bolton & Laurie Duggan (the ‘Coalcliff Gang’ and otherwise), David Campbell, and the magazine New Poetry, the most visible document of the modern and postmodern developments in the poetry of the period.
Teaching
2011. ENGL1026: Constructing the Fictive Self
Conference Papers
2011. ‘John Forbes’s entrepôt poetics’, p Poetry and the Contemporary, Deakin University.
Tara Morrissey
Doctor of Philosophy
Whiteness and Hip Hop
Bushra Naz
Master of Philosophy
Interpersonal Relations in Henry James
Laura Olcelli
Doctor of Philosophy
Italo-Australian Relations in Travel and Language
My research investigates nineteenth-century non-fictional texts that concern Australia and Italy. These chiefly consist of travel accounts, but also exploration and migration literature. By relating Australian national literature and culture to another geographical and social context, I will be able to study it from an inner, domestic point of view (Australians in Italy), as well as from an outer, foreign one (Italians in Australia). My aim is to identify the ways in which the two different cultural and linguistic identities are portrayed and influenced by ‘the other’ when travelling, exploring and migrating.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Geographical and Linguistic Disorientation in Western Australia: the Response of George Fletcher Moore’, Fifth Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature: ‘Literature and Translation’, Monash University, Melbourne.
2010. ‘Postcards from the Grand Tour: Sublime Geological Change and Curious Natural Disaster’, Fourth Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature: ‘Literature and Science’, UNSW, Sydney.
2010. ‘Travel, Language and Incomprehension in the Accounts of the “Ladies of the Grand Tour”’, Eighteenth Annual Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travel Writers Conference: ‘Journeys’, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA.
Atilla Orel
Doctor of Philosophy
Reality Striving Towards Thought: the Substance of Shelley’s Vegetarianism
Generally overlooked, undermined or openly mocked, Shelley’s sustained commitment to vegetarianism was an ethical and intellectual commitment. The consequences of this commitment resonate throughout his politics, poetry and philosophy, the records of his daily life, and his correspondence.
My thesis seeks to replace vegetarianism at the centre of Shelley’s life and work by reconstructing a more accurate sense of how vegetarianism was experienced in a meat-obsessed early nineteenth-century through readings of Shelley’s major poems,and by examining the treatment of (or failure to treat with) vegetarianism in the critical heritage that has developed around Shelley’s life and work.
Teaching and Research
Thus far my Teaching Fellowship teaching responsibilities have included ENGL 2650 (Reading Poetry) and ENGL 2627 (Reading Sexuality). I delivered a paper at the inaugural conference of the Romantic Studies Association of Australia (February 2011) and recently published my article ‘Monsters, Daemons, and Devils: The Accusations of Nineteenth Century Vegetarian Writers’ in the peer-reviewed journal Philament. I’m an active member of the Interdisciplinary C19th Research Group and am currently serving as the postgraduate representative to the executive of Sydney University’s Human Animal Research Network (HARN: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/harn/
Andrew Pippos
Doctor of Philosophy
Samuel Reese
Doctor of Philosophy
Paul Bowles: Violence, Surrealism and the Short Story
Focusing on the American short story writer, composer and photographer, Paul Bowles, my project explores the relationship between mid-twentieth century politics, surrealism, ideas of violence, and the short story as a genre. I am drawing on ideas of freedom and morality in literature, the relationship between Bowles’ musical aesthetic and his unique style of short story, and the role that surrealism played in defining his artistic expression. I aim to move towards a better understanding of this enigmatic, and oddly spectral figure on the margins of twentieth century literature.
Carolyn Rickett
Doctor of Arts
'Write your-self. Your body must be heard’: the therapeutic benefits of narrating a cancer experience
My thesis explores the role of autobiographical writing as a means of therapeutic intervention for established authors who are dealing with the impact of a cancer diagnosis. Narrating the trauma of illness is a performative act that can produce a range of healing effects.
Teaching
Australian Learning and Teaching Council Award, 2011 ALTC Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning: Carolyn Rickett, Avondale College of Higher Education, New South Wales. For inspiring and innovative teaching methods that enable Communication students to develop confidence and participate in authentic learning experiences. See website for full citation: http://www.altc.edu.au/award-outstanding-contributions-recipient-2011-ms-carolyn-rickett
Conference Papers
2011. Beveridge, Judy and Carolyn Rickett. “Poetry and Healing: The New Leaves Project,” Narrative and Healing Symposium, University of Sydney.
Refereed Conference Abstract:
2011. Rickett, Carolyn. ‘“My Body/my calamity. My body/my dignity”: The role of autobiographical writing as a therapeutic and ethical strategy for dealing with a cancer diagnosis.’ Ethical Imaginations: Writing Worlds, 16th conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, Byron Bay. See program: http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/sass/writingworldsAAWP2011/program.html
Publications
2010. Beveridge, Judy, and Carolyn Rickett, eds. Wording the World. Sydney: Puncher and Wattmann,.
2010. Joseph, Sue and Carolyn Rickett. ‘The writing cure?: ethical considerations in managing creative practice life-writing projects.’ In The Strange Bedfellows or Perfect Partners Papers: the refereed proceedings of the 15th conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs.
2011. Rickett, Carolyn, Jill Gordon and Cedric Grieve. ‘Something to hang my life on: the health benefits of writing poetry for people with serious illnesses, ’ Australasian Psychiatry 19.4: 265-268.
Chris Rudge
Doctor of Philosophy
Psychoactive Scriveners: Drugs, Language and the Philosophy of Science in the writing of Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick
Drawing upon the history and philosophy of science, and studies in language and rhetoric, this thesis examines literary representations of psychoactive drugs and their effects, both real and imagined, in a range of fiction and essay works by Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick. Writing between the literary-rhetorical and the political spheres about new findings in biochemistry and psychopharmacology and in response to the rise of drug cultures, both Huxley and Dick produced original utopian visions and paranoid political critiques, whose thematics, variously inspired and alarmed, surveyed the role of the psychoactive subject in their increasingly biochemical epochs.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Invention and the TekhnÄ“colour Labcoat: Scientific History’s Psychotropic Trace’, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Kitchener.
2012. ‘Ancient instincts, modern hardware: the vestigiality of paranoia and its reanimation in the context of modern medical surveillance technics’, The Surveillance and Everyday Life Research Group, Sydney.
Hayley Rudkin
Doctor of Philosophy
The hunger drive in the nineteenth century
My thesis explores the ways in which representations of hunger in literature changed throughout the nineteenth century. Through close analysis of a number of texts, I examine the literal and metaphoric representation of hunger as a physical and psychological drive, from Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population in the late eighteenth century, up until Freud’s theory of psychological drives in the early twentieth century. I aim to uncover the ways in which not only the act of consumption, but the desire to consume itself represents a destabilising force within these texts.
Diana Shahinyan
Doctor of Philosophy
Mean Streets: The Legal Geographies of Hammett and Faulkner
My thesis examines the law, justice and criminality encoded in the geographies of Modernist America: the urban, the middle-American town, and the South through the works of Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner. I focus on the mystery genre’s ability to stylise crime and formulate a fair apportionment of both benefit and burden in the face of the crises and unprecedented developments of the Modern. In America, detectives do not “detect” with their magnifying glass, nor do they come to ironclad conclusions of culpability. The crime does not infect the landscape; rather, in America, the crime is the landscape.
Teaching
2009. Fiction, Film and Power
2011. Narratives of Romance and Adventure
Conference Papers
2011. ‘The figure of the Lawyer in William Faulkner’s short stories”, Annual Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana
Elizabeth Shek-Noble
Doctor of Philosophy
Crip Poetics: The Erotics of Disability and Dis-Integrity in the works of Kathy Acker, Sigmund Freud, and David Wojnarowicz
This thesis considers the phenomenological and discursive entanglements of disability. My three authors, Acker, Freud, and Wojnarowicz, explore the meanings attached to disabled bodies in ableist culture. I argue that consideration of these authors cannot be separated from their own material experiences of non-normative embodiment.
Teaching
2010. ENGL2635 Contemporary American Literature
Publications
2011. ‘There Were Phantoms": Spectral Shadows in Christos Tsiolkas' Dead Europe’ forthcoming in Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL)
Conference Presentations
2011. 'Queering Disability and Disabling Queerness in Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby', Warwick University, UK
2011. 'Monstrous Cripples, Monstrous Females: The Intercorporeal Erotics of Disability in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates', UNSW, Australia
2011. 'Prosthetic Monstrosity: Reconsidering the Case of "Konrad" the Carcinoma from a Disability Studies Perspective', De Montfort University, UK.
Erin Sheil
Master of Arts (Research)
Richard Smith
Doctor of Philosophy
Elizabeth Sofatzis
Doctor of Philosophy
Theodicy and ‘the Problem of Evil’ in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Three of his Contemporaries
This thesis explores responses to ‘the problem of evil’ (the apparent challenge evil presents to belief in an omnipotent and all-good God) by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and three of his contemporaries: Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti and Robert Browning. I place Hardy, Rossetti and Browning in conversation with Hopkins on the topics of shipwreck and disaster, nature and its decay, and spiritual crisis respectively. To what extent can their responses to ‘the problem of evil’ be termed ‘theodicy,’ whether in Max Weber’s sense of the word (any explication of suffering) or in Leibniz’s (an explanation for why God permits evil)?
Teaching
ENGL 1002: Narratives of Romance and Adventure
ENGL 2629: Victorian Literature
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Thomas Hardy’s Negative Theodicy: The Titanic Disaster and “The Convergence of the Twain,”’ The Hungry Ocean: A Conference on Literary Culture and the Maritime Environment, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, United States
2009. ‘From Sense to Poetry: The Influence of Christina Rossetti and Richard Watson Dixon on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, The Victorian Sensorium, Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
2008. ‘Mindscape: Time, Memory and the Poetic Process in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,’ Living Memory: Remembering, Reinventing, Forgetting. UNSW School of English, Arts and Media’s Annual Postgraduate Conference, University of New South Wales.
Suk Joo Sohn
Doctor of Philosophy
Sexual Others and Agency in Postcolonial Literature
Mark Sutton
Doctor of Philosophy
“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”: Quotation, Originality and Influence in the Recent Work of Bob Dylan
My research looks at how Dylan’s recent art reconfigures and carries on a conversation with his own past and his own oeuvre through his frequent use of quotation and allusion, both musical and textual. I also investigate issues of originality in Dylan’s work, analysing the debate that has caused some to label Dylan as a plagiarist. My work is focused on Dylan’s albums since 2001, his memoir, his radio programme, his film (and films about him) and his visual art.
Teaching
2010. Imagining America; Fiction Film and Power
Conference Papers
2010. ‘Warp and Woof: The Past, Tradition and Questions of Originality on Bob Dylan’s “Love And Theft”’, The International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference - Instruments of Change (Monash).
2011. ‘“You Know They Refused Jesus Too”: Bob Dylan's Unforgivable Conversion’, The Unacceptable Conference (Macquarie).
2012. ‘Ideas As My Maps – Travel and Cartography In Bob Dylan’s Early Recordings’, The International Association for the Study of Popular Music Conference - Routes/Roots/Routines (Victoria University, Wellington).
2013. ‘“I Keep Recycling the Same Old Thoughts”: Another Side of Bob Dylan’s Appropriations’, New Zealand Musicological Society – Performance, Creativity, Collaboration.
Publications
2009. ‘Roadmaps For The Soul: History and Cartography in Bob Dylan’s Early Songs’, Australasian Journal Of American Studies
Lucas Thompson
Doctor of Philosophy
David Foster Wallace and the American Existential Tradition
My thesis is an exploration of several fictional and philosophical influences upon the work of David Foster Wallace which I consider to have been given inadequate scholarly treatment. I am arguing that a reading centred on revealing Wallace’s relationship to an entire constellation of existential precursors alters the way we interpret his fiction and non-fiction. My tentative hypothesis is that a detailed, exploratory reading of Wallace alongside (primarily) Kafka, Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard leads to a deeper understanding of the philosophical underpinnings, ethical ambitions, and broad thematic concerns which run throughout his work.
Irma Trnka
Master of Arts (Research)
The Effect and Influence of Shakespeare in Prison and Conflict
My project investigates the possibilities, difficulties, and rewarding and significant results of performing Shakespearean theatre with people in situations of incarceration and conflict. In the first part of my project I place particular emphasis on the only Australian Shakespeare-in-Prison program to date, at Borallon Maximum Security Correctional Centre in Ipswich, Queensland (2011). The second part of my project, Shakespeare in Conflict, will document the proliferation of Shakespeare in the Arab world and attempts that are being made through teaching and performance to use Shakespeare’s words to facilitate approaches towards peace and understanding on both sides in the Arab/Israeli conflict.
Diana Walker
Doctor of Philosophy
Shaping Shakespeare
Anna Wallace
Doctor of Philosophy
Time in Anglo-Saxon Literature
My research includes an examination of the physical measurement and understanding of time during the Anglo-Saxon period. It considers approaches and responses to time expressed in literature including secular and religious poetry and prose, as well as scientific writings and epic verse. Popular conception holds that the Anglo-Saxons were a simple people who knew little about science or the world at large, but my research shows that this is not the case: Anglo-Saxon learning and education was comparable to that of contemporary Europe, and Anglo-Saxon authors related to time in a variety of ways which they expressed in their literature.
Teaching
2010 ENGL2661 Imagining Camelot
2010 ENGL2657 Myths, Legends, and Heroes
2011 ENGL3634 Continuing Old English
2011 ENGL2657 Myths, Legends, and Heroes
Conference Papers
2011. ‘“Sorrow is renewed”: Time and Loss in Old English Elegies’, Emotions in the Medieval and Early Modern World, University of Western Australia, Perth
2011. ‘Bede, Byrhtferth, and the Borders of Time’, ANZAMEMS Biennial Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin
2010. ‘Exploring Time and Space in Andreas’, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds
Refereed Publications
2011. ‘“A Wild Shieldmaiden of the North”: Eowyn of Rohan and Old Norse Literature’, Philament, 17, 23-45
Bronwen Wareing
Doctor of Philosophy
Grief Time: Representations of Temporal Instability, Identity and Memory following Death in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Tim Parks’ Destiny and John Banville’s The Sea
My research project examines the use of temporal constructs in order to represent the physical and psychological effects of grief, as well as the crisis of meaning which follows death, in the novels of DeLillo, Parks and Banville. These ‘traumatic’ losses, resulting from suicide and illness, cause previously stable perceptions of presence and identity to be reassessed. This process transforms the worldview of those who remain, along with their way of conceputalising their connection and engagement with events of the ‘past’.
Moss Wellington
Master of Arts (Research)
Humanist Cinema and John Sayles' Casa de los Babys
I am uncovering a description of the term “humanism” as it applies to cinematic narrative, and situating the humanistic drama among related artistic endeavours, including social realist traditions. I present the work of American independent filmmaker John Sayles - in particular his 2003 film Casa de los Babys - as examples of the power of humanistic storytelling. These stories seek to politicise and complicate our understanding of people in circumstances unfamiliar to the audience, often depicting their struggle against compromised autonomy. Humanism offers inclusive and nuanced communitarian empathy as a grounding for responses to political and personal ethical quandaries.
Bradley Wells
Doctor of Philosophy
The Incarnational Performance Theology of The Collected Plays of Charles Williams
I am researching the way Charles Williams (1886-1945) enacted his unique theology through his plays. In doing so, I hope to establish an incarnational aesthetic that pervades the language and performance of all of the known verse dramas. In resurrecting this largely ‘forgotten Inkling’ I also intend to show how radical and modern he was as a thinker and playwright and how he made a hitherto unrecognized significant impact upon his various contemporaries, including, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Publications
2011. ‘London – City of Redemption: Charles Williams’s Vision of The City’ Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. Kinzel, U (ed.) Special Issue (London: Urban space as cultural experience).
2011. ‘Eucatastrophe and Co-inherence in the Utopian Vision of Charles Williams,' Colloquy Issue 21.
2010. ‘Staging Masculinity: Review of Men at Play: Masculinities in Australian Theatre since the 1950s By Jonathan Bollen, Adrian Kiernander and Bruce Parr. Amsterdam, Rodopi,’ Australian Humanities Review. Vol 49.
‘Historical Moments and Historical Change: Review of Turning Points in Australian History. Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts (ed.). Sydney: UNSW Press 2009,’ Australian Humanities Review. Vol 49. Nov 2010.
2010. 'Review: American Science Fiction Film and Television by Lincoln Geraghty, Oxford, Berg, 2009', Media International Australia Issue No.136.
Conference Papers
2012. ‘Watch Your Back! Co-inhered Humour in the Divine Vision of Charles Williams’s Verse Drama.’ Varieties of Humour and Laughter: 18th Colloquium of Australian Humour Studies Network (AHSN). Australian National University, Canberra.
Peter Wilkin
Doctor of Philosophy
Dionysus and Orpheus: ‘The Old Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry’ in the thought of Sir Francis Bacon
This project traces the tension between philosophy and poetry in Bacon’s works. It is divided into four parts: the first responds to the enigmatic and fragmentary character of Bacon’s works, offering an interpretative strategy based on his account of ‘the acroamatic method’; the second focuses on the relationship between reason and the imagination in the context of his discussion of ‘feigned history’ in The Advancement of Learning; the third examines his conception of fables, offering an analysis of The Wisdom of the Ancients; and the fourth concludes with a discussion of his new philosophical poetry in The New Atlantis.
Fiona Yardley
Doctor of Philosophy
Writers writing stories about writers writing stories: self-reflexivity, unreliability and ethics in contemporary fiction
This thesis builds on recent scholarship exploring the intersection between unreliable narration and a new ethics of fiction. Set against distinct historical backdrops, works by McEwan, Foer, Atwood and Rushdie all contain characters who are figured as the authors of the novels in which they are found, who commentate, edit, revise, and elide detail in an attempt to control unruly historical and personal narratives. By examining their self-referential involvement with the construction and communication of narrative, this thesis will attempt to build a framework for understanding the ways in which the new ethics of fiction operates in contemporary literature.
Liliana Zavaglia
Doctor of Philosophy
The Double Movements of Apology and Apologia in White Australian Narratives of Reconciliation
Yuan Zhang
Doctor of Philosophy
The Cult of Beauty: Edith Wharton’s Aesthetic Views in I-narrator Genres
This project scrutinizes Edith Wharton’s viewpoints on the aesthetic concept of beauty in I-narrator genres of autobiography, the ghost story, lyric poetry, and the realist novel. Locating the turn of the twentieth century as the historical background Wharton faces, the project proposes that Wharton shapes her unique aesthetic concept of beauty by exposure to the continuities of Victorian Aestheticism and incipient Modernism. By so doing, it intends to evince Wharton’s idiosyncratic aesthetic perceptions, long neglected, underestimated, and misunderstood.
Publications
2009. ‘Marginalized Men in Female-Authored Novels at the turn of the Twentieth Century’, A Hundred Flowers Blossoming: A Collection of Literary Essays Written By Chinese Scholars ed. Xiao-ming Yang (University Press of America)
2011. ‘Ezra Pound’s Poems Applying “Non- Subjective State,” Chinese Poetic Aestheticism’, Journal of Xi’an International Studies University 19.1, 80-82.
Conference Papers
2011. ‘Modern Spectator’s Unfulfilled Desire Catalysing Aesthetic Beauty in Viewing Pre-Raphaelites Paintings’, Desire: from Eros to Eroticism Conference, New York.