Professor Peter Marks
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Professor Peter Marks

BA Hons (UNSW), PhD (Edinburgh)
Emeritus Professor
Discipline of English and Writing
Address
A20 - John Woolley Building
The University of Sydney
Websites
Professor Peter Marks

I completed my combined Honours degree in English Literature and Political Science at UNSW, and my PhD in English at the University of Edinburgh. I taught at the University of Hull before coming to Sydney.

I have been a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh; at Clare Hall, Cambridge University; and at King’s College, London. At various times I have been Chair of the Department of English. I am particularly interested in relationships between literature and cinema, as well as between literature and politics; in periodical culture; in utopias, and in the literary and cinematic representation of surveillance.

I have written four scholarly books, the most recent of which, British Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings, was published by Edinburgh University Press in January 2018. It gives a synoptic account of literature produced in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England during a time of considerable cultural and political upheaval. Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film (2015), also published by Edinburgh University Press, deals with the ways in which surveillance is depicted and assessed in literature from Thomas More’s Utopia to Dave Eggers’ The Circle and in film from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture, published by Continuum (2011), was the first full-length treatment of Orwell’s essays in the context of the periodicals in which they first appeared. I have also written a critical study of the maverick director Terry Gilliam for Manchester University Press’s British Filmmakers series (2009).

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, and two on British Literature of the 1930s will be appearing in separate studies from Cambridge University Press in 2018. Among other things, I have published articles on the films Adaptation and Code 46, on George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Socialist realism, D. H. Lawrence, theories of the essay, and on the links between Martin Amis and Philip Larkin. My chapter on Samuel Beckett in the 1930s appears in Cambridge University Press’s Samuel Beckett in Context (2013). I have recently submitted a proposal for a Handbook on Utopian Literature to Palgrave, which will include more than fifty writers from around the globe, and will be edited by me and by two leading utopian scholars, one from Portugal, the other from the United States. If the proposal is accepted, we hope to have the book published in 2019.

As part of my commitment to tertiary level teaching, I have a Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) from the University of Sydney (2005). I have supervised PhD theses on Ted Hughes, Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, Iain Sinclair, Cyril Connolly and Horizon, Irish cinema dealing with The Troubles, the work of Ian McEwan and Bernhard Schlink, on unreliability and textual ethics, and on J.R.R. Tolkien and utopia.

  • Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Award, 2016
  • Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award (Design and Practice), 2008

Publications

Books

  • Marks, P. (2018). Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2015). Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2011). George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture. London, UK: Continuum.

Edited Books

  • Marks, P., Wagner-Lawlor, J., Vieira, F. (2022). The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2012). Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Book Chapters

  • Marks, P. (2024). The Essay and the Public Intellectual. In Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Essay, (pp. 650-664). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2022). Cinema. In Peter Marks, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Fatima Vieira (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, (pp. 231-242). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]
  • Marks, P., Vieira, F., Wagner-Lawlor, J. (2022). Introduction. In Peter Marks, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Fatima Vieira (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, (pp. 1-21). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]

Journals

  • Marks, P. (2022). 'Big Other Is Watching You' Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' and Dave Eggers' 'The Circle'. Revue d'etudes benthamiennes, 22. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2021). Are some more equal than others? Animated and animatronic adaptations of 'Animal Farm'. Textual Practice, 35(10), 1667-1683. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2013). Monitoring the Unvisible: Seeing and unseeing in China Mieville's The City & The City. Surveillance and Society, 11(3), 222-236.

Edited Journals

  • Chesher, C., Marks, P., Cleland, K. (2008). Screenscapes. Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture.

Textual Creative Works

  • Marks, P. (2024). Nineteen Eighty-Four is news that has stayed news. The Orwell Foundation, United Kingdom: The Orwell Foundation. [More Information]

Magazine / Newspaper Articles

  • Marks, P. (2023). Book review: The self-fashioning of George Orwell. Inside Story. [More Information]
  • Potter, S., Marks, P. (2023). Julia by Sandra Newman: a vibrant retelling of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Conversation. [More Information]

Other

  • Marks, P. (2005), Australia Talks Books: Down and Out in Paris and London.

2024

  • Marks, P. (2024). Nineteen Eighty-Four is news that has stayed news. The Orwell Foundation, United Kingdom: The Orwell Foundation. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2024). The Essay and the Public Intellectual. In Denise Gigante and Jason Childs (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Essay, (pp. 650-664). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]

2023

  • Marks, P. (2023). Book review: The self-fashioning of George Orwell. Inside Story. [More Information]
  • Potter, S., Marks, P. (2023). Julia by Sandra Newman: a vibrant retelling of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Conversation. [More Information]

2022

  • Marks, P. (2022). 'Big Other Is Watching You' Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' and Dave Eggers' 'The Circle'. Revue d'etudes benthamiennes, 22. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2022). Cinema. In Peter Marks, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Fatima Vieira (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, (pp. 231-242). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]
  • Marks, P., Vieira, F., Wagner-Lawlor, J. (2022). Introduction. In Peter Marks, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Fatima Vieira (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures, (pp. 1-21). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. [More Information]

2021

  • Marks, P. (2021). Are some more equal than others? Animated and animatronic adaptations of 'Animal Farm'. Textual Practice, 35(10), 1667-1683. [More Information]

2019

  • Marks, P. (2019). "Are these feelings even real?" Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze's Her. In Kim Wilkins, Wyatt Moss-Wellington (Eds.), ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze, (pp. 139-157). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2019). Debatable Ground: Journalism, Pamphlets and Social Critique. In Benjamin Kohlmann, Matthew Taunton (Eds.), A History of 1930s British Literature, (pp. 147-162). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2019). Publishing and Periodicals. In James Smith (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s, (pp. 63-80). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. [More Information]

2018

  • Marks, P. (2018). Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [More Information]

2015

  • Marks, P. (2015). Don't You See?: Surveillance and Utopian Tranquillity in The Good Soldier. In Max Saunders, Sara Haslam (Eds.), Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: Centenary Essays, (pp. 283-298). Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2015). George Orwell and the History of Surveillance Studies. In Richard Lance Keeble (Eds.), George Orwell Now!, (pp. 13-29). New York: Peter Lang Publishing. [More Information]
  • Marks, P. (2015). Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [More Information]

2014

  • Marks, P. (2014). Illusion and reality: The spectre of socialist realism in thirties literature. In Keith Williams, Steven Matthews (Eds.), Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After, (pp. 23-36). London, UK: Routledge.
  • Marks, P. (2014). Wolvogs, Pigoons and Crakers: Invasion of the bodysplices in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. In Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman (Eds.), Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities, (pp. 166-177). Oxon: Routledge. [More Information]

2013

  • Marks, P. (2013). England: 1933-1936. In Anthony Uhlmann (Eds.), Samuel Beckett in Context, (pp. 87-98). New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Marks, P. (2013). Monitoring the Unvisible: Seeing and unseeing in China Mieville's The City & The City. Surveillance and Society, 11(3), 222-236.
  • Smith, G., Westcott, H., San Roque, M., Marks, P. (2013). Surveillance texts and textualism: Truthtelling and trustmaking in an uncertain world. Surveillance and Society, 11(3), 215-221.

2012

  • Marks, P. (2012). Introduction: Pushing the World in Certain Directions. In Peter Marks (Eds.), Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions, (pp. 1-10). Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Marks, P. (2012). Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions. Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Marks, P. (2012). Pleeblands, Compounds and Paradice: Utopian and Dystopian Spaces in Oryx and Crake. In Peter Marks (Eds.), Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions, (pp. 214-224). Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

2011

  • Marks, P. (2011). George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture. London, UK: Continuum.
  • Marks, P. (2011). Money, 'Money', Money: Cultural Transactions Between Philip Larkin and Martin Amis. Sydney Studies in English, 37, 71-91.

2009

  • Marks, P. (2009). Art and politics in the 1930s: the European Quarterly (1934-5), Left Review (1934-8), and Poetry and the People (1938-40). In Thacker, Andrew; Brooker, Peter (Eds.), The Oxford critical and cultural history of Modernist magazines, (pp. 623-646). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Marks, P. (2009). Terry Gilliam. United Kingdom: Manchester University Press.

2008

  • Marks, P. (2008). Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman. Sydney Studies in English, 34, 19-40.
  • Chesher, C., Marks, P., Cleland, K. (2008). Screenscapes. Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture.
  • Marks, P. (2008). Surveillance screens and screening in "Code 46". Scan (Sydney): journal of media arts culture, 5(1), 1-15.

2005

  • Marks, P. (2005). "And God Saw Everything": Paradise, Utopia and Surveillance. Script and Print: bulletin of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand., 29(1-4), 178-191.
  • Marks, P. (2005), Australia Talks Books: Down and Out in Paris and London.
  • Marks, P. (2005). Imagining surveillance: utopian visions and surveillance studies. Surveillance and Society, 3(2-3), 222-239.

2004

  • Marks, P. (2004). Making The New: Literary Periodical And The Construction Of Modernism. Precursors and Aftermaths, 0.084027778, 24-39.

2001

  • Marks, P. (2001). Thinking on Paper:Incompleteness and the Essay. Sydney Studies in English, 27, 42-57.

Selected Grants

2019

  • The International Orwell: Case Studies from Eastasia, Oceania and Eurasia, Marks P, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Discovery Projects (DP)

2013

  • Camera-Stylo: Intersections in Literature and Cinema, Isaacs B, Kelly D, Marks P, University of Sydney/Conference Seed Funding Scheme

In the media

  • 10/06/2024 - opinion piece on ABC "Religion and Ethics": "Nineteen Eighty-Four": 75 years after its publication, George Orwell’s prophecy is as powerful as ever