Associate Professor Peter Marks

BA (Hons) NSW PhD Edin.

+61 2 9351 6862
Room N311, John Woolley Building (A20)

I am particularly interested in literature as social critique; in relationships between literature and cinema as well as between literature and politics; in periodical culture, and in utopias (broadly conceived). My new book, George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture, published by Continuum Books (2011) is the first full-length treatment of Orwell’s essays. I also produced the first sustained critical study of the director Terry Gilliam for Manchester University Press’s British Filmmakers series (2009). Another line of current research investigates surveillance as it has been predicted, depicted and assessed in literary and cinematic utopias, employing recent surveillance theory to investigate utopias, and utopias to analyse surveillance theory. I have published several articles on this topic (see, for example, ‘Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies’), and am a member of the ‘Surveillance in Everyday Life’ and the ‘Environmental Humanities’ research groups at the University of Sydney. Three chapters on politics and its influence on British and American literary periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s appear in the first two volumes of the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. I have published articles on the films Adaptation and Code 46, on how periodicals such as Blast and Transition helped literary Modernism come into being, as well as on George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Socialist realism, D. H. Lawrence and on theories of the essay. I have a chapter forthcoming on Samuel Beckett in the 1930s for Cambridge University Press’s Beckett in Context and am editing and contributing to the book Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions. I am a Fellow of the English Association (UK) and was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge (2009-10).

As part of my interest in tertiary level teaching I have a Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) from the University of Sydney (2005), and was awarded a Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award (Design and Practice) in 2008.

Publications 2005-2011

Books

• Marks, P R 2011, George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture (Continuum)
• Marks, P R 2009, Terry Gilliam, Manchester University Press, Manchester

Book chapters

• Marks, P R 2011, The Left in the Twenties, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press)
• Marks, P R 2011, The Left in the Thirties, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 2 North America, 1880–1960 (Oxford University Press)
• Marks, P R 2009, Art and Politics in the 1930s: The European Quarterly, Left Review and Poetry and the People, Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume 1 Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford University Press)

Journal articles

• Marks, P R 2008, Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman, Sydney Studies in English, 34, 19-40
• Chesher, C, Marks, P R, Cleland, K J (eds.) 2008, Screenscapes, Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture
• Marks, P R 2008, Surveillance screens and screening in 'Code 46', Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture, 5(1), 1-15
• Marks, P R 2005, 'And God Saw Everything': Paradise, Utopia and Surveillance, Script & Print: bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, 29(1-4), 178-191
• Marks, P R 2005, Imagining surveillance: utopian visions and surveillance studies, Surveillance and Society, 3(2-3), 222-239

Areas of teaching

• Contemporary British literature
• Twentieth-century literature
• Literature and cinema
• Literature and politics
• Utopias and dystopias