Professor Robert Dixon

BA (Hons) PhD Syd FAHA
Professor of Australian Literature

+61 2 9036 7231
Room N404, John Woolley Building A20

Robert Dixon is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a past-President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (1995-7), a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2008-10), judge of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (2004-9), chair of the Nita B Kibble Literary Award, and a consultant to ACARA on the Australian Curriculum: English.

Research Interests

• Australian literature and literary criticism
• colonialism and its culture
• Australian cultural studies
• postcolonial studies
• Australian art history, photography and early cinema.

Current Research

Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a National Literature
The Novels of Alex Miller

Research Group

Nineteenth-Century Studies

Publications 2005-2011

Books

• Dixon, R W (ed.) [in press], The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, Allen and Unwin, Sydney
• Kirkpatrick, P, Dixon, R W (eds.) [in press], Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W 2011, Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurleys Synchronized Lecture Entertainments, Anthem Press, London
• Dixon, R W, Lee, C (eds.) 2011, The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912-1941, Anthem Press, London
• Dixon, R W, Birns, N (eds.) 2010, Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Bode, K, Dixon, R W (eds.) 2009, Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W, Kelly, V (eds.) 2008, Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s to 1960s, Sydney University Press, Sydney

Journal articles

• Dixon, R W 2011, Ground Zero: Nicholas Rothwell's natural history of destruction, Studies in Travel Writing
• Dixon, R W 2010, Peter Carey's and Ray Lawrence's 'Bliss' (1985): fiction, film and power, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 3(3), 279-294
• Dixon, R W 2009, Home or away? The trope of place in Australian literary criticism and literary history, Westerly, 54(1), 12-17
• Dixon, R W 2009, Travelling mass-media circus: Frank Hurley and colonial modernity, Arts: the proceedings of the Sydney University Arts Association, 31, 9-29
• Dixon, R W 2008, Australian literature and the new empiricism: a response to Paul Eggert, 'Australian classics and the price of books', JASAL - Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2008 (Special Issue: The Colonial Present), 158-162
• Dixon, R W 2008, Ghosts in the machine: modernity and the unmodern in Gail Jones's 'Dreams of speaking', JASAL - Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 8, 121-137
• Dixon, R W 2007, Australian Literature-International Contexts, Southerly, 67(1-2), 15-27
• Dixon, R W 2007, Cosmopolitanism and Australian Studies, Australian Studies, 19(2), 95-112
• Dixon, R W 2007, Spotting the fake: C.E.W. Bean, Frank Hurley and the making of the 1923 photographic record of the war, History of Photography, 31(2), 165-179
• Dixon, R W 2007, What Was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing, Studies in Travel Writing, 11(1), 59-81
• Dixon, R W 2006, Travelling Mass-Media Circus: Frank Hurley's Synchronized Lecture Entertainments, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 33(1), 60-87
• Dixon, R W 2005, Internationalizing Australian Studies: The Year's Work in Non-Fiction 2004-2005, Westerly, 50, 123-138
• Dixon, R W 2005, Tim Winton, Cloudstreet and the field of Australian literature, Westerly, 50, 245-260

Book chapters

• Dixon, R W (in press), Disestablished Worlds: the Novels of Alex Miller, The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, Allen and Unwin, Sydney
• Dixon, R W (in press), Republics of Letters and Literary Communities, Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W (in press), Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W, Lee, C 2011, Introduction, The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912-1941, Anthem Press, London, xi-xlii
• Dixon, R W 2010, 'Turning a Place into a Field': Shirly Hazzard's 'The Great Fire' and Cold War Area Studies, Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W, Birns, N 2010, Introduction, Reading Across the Pacific: Australia-United States Intellectual Histories, Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W 2010, Introduction to Fergus W. Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab [1886], Sydney University Press, Sydney
• Dixon, R W 2010, Australian literature and the cultural dimensions of globalization, Modern Australian Criticism and Theory, China Ocean University Press, Qingdao
• Dixon, R W 2009, Australian Fiction and the world republic of letters, 1890-1950, The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, Cambridge University Press, Australia, 223-253
• Dixon, R W 2009, Australian literature in the translation zone: Robert Dessaix and David Malouf, Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 87-104
• Dixon, R W 2009, Pictures at an exhibition: the exhibitionary context of early Aboriginal cinema and photographic culture, Creative Nation: Australian cinema and cultural studies reader, Sports & Spiritual Science Publications, 385-404
• Bode, K, Dixon, R W 2009, Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age, Resourceful Reading: A New Empiricism in the Digital Age, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1-27
• Dixon, R W, Kelly, V 2008, Australian vernacular modernities: people, sites and practices, Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s to 1960s, Sydney University Press, Sydney, xiii-xxiv
• Dixon, R W 2007, The Sandline Mercenaries Affair: Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation-State, Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 131-148