Staging Sappho: investigating new methodologies in Classical Performance Reception. This project will make a significant contribution to Australia's profile as a research innovator in Arts and Humanities. It is the first research project of its kind to integrate theories of Classical reception and textual transmission with performance theory and practice. As such, it will further the knowledge base of the discipline of Classical Reception Studies by introducing a new methodology to the field, an ....Staging Sappho: investigating new methodologies in Classical Performance Reception. This project will make a significant contribution to Australia's profile as a research innovator in Arts and Humanities. It is the first research project of its kind to integrate theories of Classical reception and textual transmission with performance theory and practice. As such, it will further the knowledge base of the discipline of Classical Reception Studies by introducing a new methodology to the field, and will also benefit the community in terms of cultural engagement.Read moreRead less
Whiteness: writing, reading, race. The national and community benefits of this project lie in the contribution it will make to the wider work of Australian reconciliation through its analyses of writing as one of the important meeting grounds between white and Aboriginal Australians. By analysing the race relations of writing culture, the project will contribute to the important work of understanding white-Indigenous relations in contemporary postcolonial Australia.
The importance of the fictional character in literary theory and cultural practice. This project is a theoretical research project which aims to make significant and innovative contributions to research excellence in literature and the history of ideas. This research focuses on the fictional character, one of the central categories of literary theory. The benefits flowing from it will primarily be an enhanced understanding of the workings and the history of a category that informs every domain o ....The importance of the fictional character in literary theory and cultural practice. This project is a theoretical research project which aims to make significant and innovative contributions to research excellence in literature and the history of ideas. This research focuses on the fictional character, one of the central categories of literary theory. The benefits flowing from it will primarily be an enhanced understanding of the workings and the history of a category that informs every domain of cultural practice.Read moreRead less
Print Manager: Jonathan Swift and Anglo-Irish Print Culture 1680-1750. In Swift studies Australia has both a leading position and a key group of internationally recognised scholars (David Woolley at Perth, Harold Love at Monash, Ian Higgins at ANU , Robert Phiddian at Flinders, myself at Monash). Monash also has the internationally significant Swift Collection of manuscripts, books and associated material, all of the digital databases and microfilms, and is the leading centre for Swift research ....Print Manager: Jonathan Swift and Anglo-Irish Print Culture 1680-1750. In Swift studies Australia has both a leading position and a key group of internationally recognised scholars (David Woolley at Perth, Harold Love at Monash, Ian Higgins at ANU , Robert Phiddian at Flinders, myself at Monash). Monash also has the internationally significant Swift Collection of manuscripts, books and associated material, all of the digital databases and microfilms, and is the leading centre for Swift research and eighteenth-century literary research in Australia. This project will enhance Australian strength in and contribution to the world-wide study of Swift and his work, deepen Australian awareness of its Anglo-Irish colonial heritage, and reveal new dimensions to its Irish-Australian heritage. Read moreRead less
Regimes of reading. The project analyses the ways in which reading and interpretation have been socially organised across a range of cultures, from ancient Rome to the contemporary world of virtual reality. It focuses in particular on conflict between different practices of reading in order to highlight the cultural assumptions underlying the uses of texts.
Performing authorship in the digital literary sphere. This project undertakes the first detailed analysis of literary authorship in the digital era to understand how networked communication technologies have made authorship both more accessible and more elite than ever before. Research findings will be disseminated internationally throughout the project via an interactive weblog open to the public.
A Generic Study of Colette's Short Writing. The study uses "genre" as a key to a literary-historical account of Colette's short writing in its cultural context. The corpus is generically ambiguous, since it first appeared as "articles" in magazines and was later collected in volumes, thus acquiring a more "literary" status as "essays". Taking into account both the conditions of publication and the rhetoric of these pieces, I shall investigate the network of cultural relations in which they parti ....A Generic Study of Colette's Short Writing. The study uses "genre" as a key to a literary-historical account of Colette's short writing in its cultural context. The corpus is generically ambiguous, since it first appeared as "articles" in magazines and was later collected in volumes, thus acquiring a more "literary" status as "essays". Taking into account both the conditions of publication and the rhetoric of these pieces, I shall investigate the network of cultural relations in which they participate, and their command of their readership. This will show how Colette made a place for "women's knowledge" in public culture and what that place was.Read moreRead less
Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban l ....Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature, Popular Culture and Urban Experience in Colonial Melbourne. This study will contextualise Marcus Clarke's career in terms of the material culture of nineteenth-century Melbourne, producing the first complete and theoretically informed monograph on Australia's most important colonial prose writer. Clarke's self-conscious bohemianism highlighted the increasingly commercialised nature of nineteenth-century writing, the centrality of mass entertainment to urban life, the circulation of cultural capital between Europe and Australia, and the emergence of Australian literary nationalism in a larger imperial context. His career is thus uniquely positioned to elucidate the hitherto under-explored but pivotal relationship between literature and commodified popular culture in the specific context of an Australian settler-colony. Read moreRead less
Affective Communities: Anti-Imperial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. This project is a study of five friendships between anti-imperial Europeans and South Asians at the turn of the nineteenth-century. Its aim is to offer a reading of anti-colonial politics as the product of numerous transnational collaborations, friendships and conversations between western and non-western dissidents. It will extend the theoretical paradigms of postcolonial studies by challenging orthodox understandings ....Affective Communities: Anti-Imperial Thought and the Politics of Friendship. This project is a study of five friendships between anti-imperial Europeans and South Asians at the turn of the nineteenth-century. Its aim is to offer a reading of anti-colonial politics as the product of numerous transnational collaborations, friendships and conversations between western and non-western dissidents. It will extend the theoretical paradigms of postcolonial studies by challenging orthodox understandings of the colonial encounter as a violent and antagonistic clash between western power and non-western dissidence. New information will also be brought to bear on the history of the Indo-European colonial encounter.Read moreRead less
Locating science fiction. The project will devise and develop a new 'cultural materialist' paradigm for science fiction studies and apply it to a case study of science fictional representations of catastrophe, especially nuclear war, plague and extreme climate change.