English research projects
Entertaining the supernatural: Animal magnetism, spiritualism, secular magic and psychical science
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Evaluating the Australian popular fiction archive: A definitive critical history and bibliography of early to late colonial genre writing
This project will produce the first complete critical history of Australian popular or genre fiction from the early to the late colonial period: from around the 1840s to the beginning of World War Two. It will also produce an online bibliography and digital archive designed to function as major reading, research and teaching resources. Understanding colonial genre fiction as a field of writing that expressed colonial sensibilities and performed colonial predicaments, this project will generate a comprehensive account of popular literary culture in colonial Australia and demonstrate the formative role it played in the task of settlement and nation building.
Gothic fiction and imagined worlds: Popular literature, emotion, and the transformation of experience in modernity
Gothic Fiction is the most important prose genre of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Drawing on recent developments in cultural theory, this project is the first to study Gothic Fiction as a literary system, marked by its construction of fictional worlds radically incommensurate with "reality". It offers a powerful revision of previous accounts of Gothic's imagined realities, their ability to rouse the emotions of readers, and their consequent impact on the real world. The project contributes to debates about the nature of experience, the emotions prompted by imagined/virtual worlds, and the role of literature in modernity. It provides a revisionary account of a key stage in the development of contemporary notions of experience, the fictive, imagined/virtual worlds, and the modern crisis of representation.
Insect societies and social butterflies: Natural history and sociability in the romantic period
This project will marry literary analysis to the history of science and sexuality in order to establish a newly expanded paradigm for romantic sociability in Linnaean natural history. A key innovation will be my examination of the way in which texts about social insects act out social theory and critique through an extensive repertoire of analogies, from the Amazonian kingdoms of bees to the military formations of colonising termites.
Literary character and regimes of reading
The concept of fictional character is perhaps the most problematic and the most under-theorized of the basic categories of narrative theory. It is also perhaps the most widely-used of all critical tools, at all levels of analysis; and its sheer obviousness disguises the conceptual difficulties it presents. I identify four major strands of theorisation of character (humanist, structuralist, historical, and psychoanalytic) and seek to construct a workable synthetic model of character from them, focused on a historical account of relations between forms of character and forms of personhood, and on the mechanisms of identification through which character works on its readers.
Literature, citizenship and federation in Australia and New Zealand, 1880-1918
Between 1880 and 1918, as Australia and New Zealand transformed from settler colonial societies to Federation and Dominion, literature - popular, canonical and political - played a pivotal role in defining citizenship. Using a cultural comparative approach, this project analyses this formative and dynamic period of cultural nationalism, often overlooked in historical accounts. Comparing the literatures of the two fledgling nations, it asks: how did literature inform nationalist debates, what were the self-representations and values shared and disputed by the two nations, and how precisely did writings of the period contribute to present-day discourses of citizenship and nation?
Medieval Studies: The Early Middle Ages to 1200
For more information visit the Medieval Studies: The Early Middle Ages to 1200 website.
Melancholy and Australian literature
Dr Jennifer Rutherford and Prof Brian Castro
Many scholars have commented on the centrality of melancholy in Australian political, historical, visual and literary discourses but no major study of melancholy in Australia has as yet been undertaken. Drawing on new insights and theoretical perspectives of recent scholarship in the field, this project will identify a distinctively Australian melancholy. Focusing on the field of literary production we explore melancholy as an essential counterpart to nationalism by drawing on a range of sources including literary texts, literary archives, interviews and social and political commentaries. The project will produce an invaluable archive of material and forge a link between sadness, literature and the formation of a national culture.
Multiplying worlds: Romanticism, modernity and the emergence of virtual reality
This study, funded by an ARC Discovery grant, argues that modern forms, understandings and experiences of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780-1830). To establish this aetiology of perhaps the most important phenomenon of the digital age, it maps the emergence of virtual realities in popular entertainment, Enlightenment schemes for managing the real, and Romantic literature and art. In so doing, it develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, "high" and "low" literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. These literary, historical and philosophical studies reveal the extent to which contemporary discourses of virtual reality are shaped by assumptions that date from the romantic period.
Photography and eugenics: An historical investigation of photography's role in the development and popularisation of the eugenics movement
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Postmodernism in contemporary Australian art-music: Analysis and reappraisal
Assoc Prof David Bennett, with Linda Kouvaras, Faculty of Music
This project will be the first systematic investigation of the emergence of postmodernism in Australian art-music, combining the perspectives of Musicology and Cultural Studies. It will demonstrate how resistance to postmodern cultural theory is hampering the critical reception of important new trends in contemporary Australian art-music. Through a series of case studies of major works and their critical reception, and investigations of music-teaching practices, it will develop new methodologies for a synergy between Australian musicology and postmodern cultural studies. Its primary outcome will be a monograph that puts Australian art-music on the map of international debates about postmodernism in music.
Revolution and the everyday: performative interventions in art, theatre and politics in 1960s Japan
This study is an investigation of visual and performing arts in relation to key historical events from 1960s Japan. The study aims to document and analyse important art works and artist groups and explores how their work engages with 1960s cultural history. To this end, the study identifies four events ‘frames’: the anti-US treaty movement, the Olympics, student protests, and the 1970 World Expo as sites of arts and cultural interaction. The study develops our understanding of Japanese society in the postwar era by exploring the nexus between creative arts and Japan’s intellectual and cultural history.
Australian Research Council Discovery-Project Grant
Royal Ritual and the Order of the Garter; Traditions, Modernity and the Medieval in England, 1348-2002
The cultural history of the British monarchy can be characterised as a set of negotiations between the rival claims of tradition and modernity. The monarchy depends on its medieval past for cultural authority while also constantly seeking to reform and renew itself. This project analyses one of the monarchy’s olderst rituals, the Order of the Garter, using its contested medieval origins and subsequent history as a powerful symptomatic register of the strategies by which the monarchy adapts its traditional heritage to changing social contexts. Comprehending this dynamic will revise our understanding of the relationship between medieval culture, tradition and modernity. This project was funded by an ARC Discovery Grant, 2004-2006.
Theatre in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Culture in a Modern Global Context
Dr Denise Varney, Dr Peter Eckersall, Prof Barbara Hatley (University of Tasmania), Dr Chris Hudson (RMIT).
This project is concerned with culture, location and modernity in the Asia-Pacific region. More specifically it addresses the crucial and timely question of the relationship between modernity and globalization within the diverse theatrical cultures of the region. Its multiregional perspective offers a unique insight, rich with methodological implications into non-European modernities that have developed among different and uneven historical pathways. A team of researchers with specialization in theatre practice in Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore will develop new methods and strategies for understanding the diverse cultures of our region in a modern global context.
Australian Research Council Discovery-Project Grant
The Dramaturgies Project
Dr Peter Eckersall and Paul Monaghan (VCA) and Melanie Beddie (artist).
The Dramaturgies Project is a research and development laboratory that aims to explore, reflect on and give rise to dramaturgical practice in – and as a basis for – making innovative performance in Australian theatre. Dramaturgies #4 (the forth in a series) will have a national focus and will invite participants from diverse sectors of the theatre and performance community, and across a broad range of cultural backgrounds. The resulting ecology promises to bring to the forum new perspectives, creative approaches, industrial experience and imaginative responses to the shifting terrain of theatre making in the twenty-first century.
A Vice Chancellor’s Knowledge Transfer Award Project. Partners: Australia Council, Malthouse Theatre, Realtime.
Victorian Metamorphoses
At the end of the nineteenth century the Victorian period underwent a radical reconfiguration by fin-de-siécle writers whose creative agenda motivated them to (mis)represent the era as repressed and artistically sterile. This stance was adopted by several Modernist authors, and influenced many twentieth-century writers' representations of the nineteenth century, particularly in de-colonized nations. Combining feminist, postmodern and postcolonial theories, this project will examine the reinvention of Victorian literature and culture over the last century, and the construction of the Victorians as 'historical others', interrogating why revisionism continues and how myths of Victorianism were constructed and have entered into general circulation.
More research projects
Further information on the variety of projects in which staff and research fellows are involved is available on their profile pages, which can be accessed from the following pages: