School of Culture & Communication English

English: Our research partnerships

Australian fiction 1989 to 2005, and its national and global infrastructures

Prof Ken Gelder, with Dr Paul Salzman, La Trobe University

This project is a systematic examination of Australian fiction published between 1989 and 2005: after the Australian Bicentenary and into the new millennium. It situates this field in a range of activating institutional or infrastructural contexts: cultural, social, educational, political, economic. The primary framework for analysis is the relationship between national cultural interests and globalisation, traced in terms of literary production and distribution, dissemination and reception. This innovative project will produce the first sustained and broad-based analysis of this recent, highly-productive period of Australian literary history.

Medievalist Desires: Who Wants to Know about the Middle Ages?

Prof Stephanie Trigg with Tom Prendergast (College of Wooster, Ohio)

This is an essay contracted for a new collection, Desiring Historicism: Medieval Literary Studies in the New Century, edited by Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala (Palgrave). It is a collaborative project with Tom Prendergast (College of Wooster, Ohio), and part of a longer theoretical study exploring the contested relationship between medieval studies and the emergent discipline of medievalism studies.

Much historical scholarship is predicated on distinguishing truth from fiction, on ascertaining the ‘correct’ historical facts or contexts for reading literary texts, and scholarship of the middle ages is no exception. Over the course of the twentieth century, as recent scholarship has shown, this led to the production of a distinctive professional identity for the medievalist, and the firm enclosure of medieval studies in the academy. With the growth of interest in medievalist film, fiction, fantasy and ‘creative anachronism’ since the 1980s, however, the ‘medieval’ is no longer the preserve of the professional to the same extent. This chapter will explore some of the forms of historical knowledge about the medieval in current circulation. What are the implications for historical research when a website about Tolkien’s Middle Earth is indistinguishable in form from a website about Chaucer’s England? When fiction writers and filmmakers ‘research’ medieval culture, what does this entail? How has the ease of internet research affected the traditional division between the academic and general reader, and the structure and decorums of historical research? Have the desires of popular medievalism reclaimed the middle ages back from the academy?

Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory

Prof Stephanie Trigg with Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), Louise D’Arcens (University of Wollongong) and John Ganim (University of California, Riverside)

This project is the first comprehensive study of the influence of medievalism - the imaginative reconstruction of the middle ages - on Australian literature and culture. Detailed examinations of archives, texts, artefacts and public records from 1800 to the present will trace Australia’s transformations of its European medieval legacy, with reference to literary, public, academic and popular modes of writing and cultural production. The research will offer a new perspective on Australian cultural history, and the first comparative study of Australia's relationship with international medievalism. An illustrated monograph, a refereed essay collection and a digital repository will bring the results to the public.

Minds, Bodies, Machines: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Technologies in the 21st Century

Prof Deirdre Coleman, with Dr Paul Hyland (Chairman of Constraint Technologies International), Dr Fiona Brideoake (University of Melbourne) , Stephen Sheehan (PhD candidate, University of Melbourne) and John Bailey (PhD candidate, University of Melbourne).

www.mindsbodiesmachines.org

Minds, Bodies, Machines brings university researchers from the humanities and social sciences together with professionals from the IT community in order to explore questions that are central to our highly technological age: what is life, what is mind, can machines think and be self-aware, what does the human imagination bring to hard science?

These present-day questions have an important prehistory in the eighteenth-century clockwork universe of living machines. Using an interdisciplinary methodology to explore technologically-driven social change across a period of more than two hundred years, the project is committed to generating new and fresh ways of thinking about emerging ideas of intense debate and controversy, such as humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence. Recovering the insights and the cultural vocabularies of the past will enrich our understanding of the future of human society.

This project is funded by a Linkage Grant from the Australia Research Council. The collaborating organisation is Constraint Technologies International (CTI), Melbourne.

Seeing Change: Science, Culture and Technology in the Antipodes from the age of Darwin

A multi-media research collaboration

Prof Deirdre Coleman, with Professor Iain McCalman (University of Sydney), Professor John Chappell (Australian National University), Dr Paul Hyland (Chairman of Constraint Technologies International) and Dr Nigel Erskin (Curator, Australian National Maritime Museum).

This projects aims to build a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional research collaboration using digital, visual and print technologies to demonstrate the under-recognised role of Australia and the Antipodes in shaping key evolutionary ideas within the spheres of environmental science, culture and technology during the nineteenth century, and the relevance of these ideas to present-day environmental and technological challenges within our region and globe.

It aims to build a collaboration across the humanities, natural sciences, business technology and public culture sectors that will use new forms of digital and visual research to demonstrate the neglected importance of Australasia in the formation of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and to suggest the relevance of these ideas to understanding contemporary issues of environmental sustainability and the development of frontier technologies within our society and region.

This ARC Linkage project involves a partnership between three leading Australian Universities and four industry partners. The four industry partners are:

Women writers and the production of British history 1763-1886

Dr Clara Tuite, with Assoc Prof Mary Spongberg, Macquarie University

This project addresses the critical neglect of women who engaged in writing history in Britain during the nineteenth century. It will demonstrate the importance of women writers in the construction of a national identity in Britain and will seek to understand how women engaged with nationalist history-making and used various forms of historical writing to explore their heritage. The social and political issues that occupied women as writers of history remain pertinent today in relation to how societies generate public memory and the nature of the relationship between political exclusion and historical writing.

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