Associate Professor Vanessa Smith

BA Syd. PhD Camb

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

My research straddles the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, and is primarily concerned with issues of intercultural contact. My ARC QEII fellowship 'A Gift for Friendship: intimacy and exchange in Oceanic encounter' examined the ways in which European ethics of friendship were placed under scrutiny in contexts of imperial encounter. My current research explores the links between the development of notions of emotional subjectivity and intercultural exchange. I'm also engaged in a study of fiction's object relations from Defoe to Winnicott. 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

• Emotional subjectivity and intercultural exchange (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)
• Fiction's object relations: from Defoe to Winnicott

Research Areas

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

Publications

Books

Smith, V J, Mutiny and Aftermath: James Morrison’s Account of the Mutiny on the Bounty and the Island of Tahiti (co-­-edited with Nicholas Thomas) University of Hawaii Press, in press, forthcoming 2013

Smith, V J, Intimate Strangers: friendship, exchange and Pacific encounters, Cambridge University Press, cloth and paperback 2010

Smith, V J, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-­-Century Textual Encounters, Cambridge University Press; cloth 1998/paperback 2005

Smith, V J, Islands in History and Representation, (co-­-edited with Rod Edmond) Routledge; cloth 2003/paperback 2006

Smith, V J, Exploration and Exchange: a south seas anthology, 1680-­-1900, (with Jonathan Lamb and Nicholas Thomas), University of Chicago Press; cloth/paperback 2000

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, Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 35, 53-75
• Smith, V J 2005, Crossing the Beach at Taipivai: the Psychogeography of Islands, ESQ: a journal of the American renaissance, 51(1-3), 105-113
• Smith, V J 2004, ‘Crowd Scenes: Pacific Collectivity and European Encounter’, Pacific Studies 27, nos 1-­- 2, (March/June): 1-­-21

Book chapters

• Smith, V J, '"How very little he can learn": exotic visitors and the transmission of cultural knowledge in eighteenth-century London', Yi Zheng, Ofer Gal eds., Roots Orbits Vessels, Springer 2013.
• Smith, V J, ‘Joseph Banks’s Intermediaries: rethinking global cultural exchange’, in Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (Columbia University Press), forthcoming 2013
• Smith, V J, 'Point Venus', in Sandhya Patel ed., Contacts in Context, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013.
• 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
• Smith, V J, ‘Costume Changes: Passing at Sea and on the Beach’ in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, Routledge, 2004, pp. 37-­-53
• Smith, V J, ‘Pitcairn’s ‘Guilty stock’: the island as breeding ground’. In Islands in History and Representation, 2003, pp. 116-­-132
• Smith, V J, Introduction, Islands in History and Representation, 2003, pp. 1-­-18 (with Rod Edmond)
• Smith, V J, ‘Crusoe in the South Seas: Beachcombers, Missionaries and the Myth of the Castaway’, in Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (eds), Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, London: Macmillan, 1996