Associate Professor Vanessa Smith

BA Syd. PhD Camb

+61 2 9351 2857
Room S317, John Woolley Building (A20)

My research straddles the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is primarily concerned with issues of intercultural contact. My ARC QEII fellowship 'A Gift for Friendship: intimacy and exchange in Oceanic encounter' explored the ways in which European ethics of friendship were placed under scrutiny in contexts of imperial encounter. I am now beginning to research the links between the development of notions of emotional subjectivity and intercultural exchange. I have a mixed bag of further interests, from breadfruit to recycling, mourning rituals to cross-dressing. My teaching is in the areas of Literature and Travel, Victorian Literature and late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture. I supervise research students in any of these areas.

Research groups

• Literature and Travel
• Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Nineteenth-Century Studies
• Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies group

Current projects

• Research into cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Research Areas

• late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture
• post-colonial theory
• literature and anthropology
• Pacific history and literature.

Publications 2005-2011

Books

Smith, V J 2010, Intimate Strangers: Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Edited journal issues

Smith, V J, Yeo, R 2009, Parergon 26(2) Friendship in Early Modern Philosophy and Science

Journal articles

• Smith, V J 2009, 'Prizeable Companions': Missing Friends in the Marquesan Accounts of William Crook, Edward Robarts and Herman Melville, Leviathan (Malden): a journal of Melville studies, 11(2), 10-23
• Smith, V J 2009, Banks, Tupaia, and Mai: cross-cultural exchanges and friendship in the Pacific, Parergon, 26(2), 139-160
• Smith, V J, Yeo, R 2009, Friendship in Early Modern Philosophy and Science, Parergon, 26(2), 1-9
• Smith, V J 2008, Performance anxieties: grief and theatre in European writing on Tahiti, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41(2), 149-164
• Smith, V J 2006, Crossing the Beach at Taipivai: the Psychogeography of Islands, ESQ: a journal of the American renaissance, 51(1-3), 105-113
• Smith, V J 2006, Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 35, 53-75

Book chapters

• Smith, V J 2005, Piracy and Exchange: Stevenson's Pacific Fiction, Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Robert Louis Stevenson, Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia, 261-306