Prof Deirdre Coleman
Robert Wallace Chair of English
Biography
Deirdre Coleman completed Honours in English at the University of Melbourne before going to Oxford University where she graduated with a BPhil (1979) in Victorian literature and a DPhil (1986) on Coleridge's journalism. Since returning to Australia she has taught at the Universities of Wollongong, Adelaide and Sydney. While at the University of Sydney she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research Supervision. In December 2006 she was appointed Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne.
Current ARC-funded research
ARC Discovery Project (2005-2007), 'Insect Societies and Social Butterflies: Natural History and Sociability in the Romantic period'
This project marries 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 colonizing termites. Several journal articles and book chapters have already been published. The project will be rounded off with a biography of the flycatcher Henry Smeathman (1742-1786), tracking him from Scarborough to London, then to West Africa and the West Indies in the 1770s, ending in Paris in the early 1780s.
ARC Linkage Project (2006-2008), 'Minds, Bodies, Machines: a cultural and intellectual history of technologies in the 21st century'
This project brings literary, cultural and historical understandings of the Enlightenment into a new and productive relationship with the contemporary world of computer technologies and the emerging fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The questions we pursue are: 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. Recovering the insights and the cultural vocabularies of the past will enrich our understanding of the future of human society in a highly technological age. The collaborating organization is Constraint Technologies International, Melbourne, with funding for two APAIs.
Selected publications
Books
- Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
- Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Leicester UP, 1999)
- Coleridge and 'The Friend' (1809-1810) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
Edited books
- Women Writing Home, 1700-1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire, Australia, vol. 2 of 6 vols (Pickering & Chatto, 2006).
- Imagining Romanticism: Essays on English and Australian Romanticisms. Co-edited with Dr Peter Otto. (W. Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1992)
- Olga Masters: Reporting Home. Her Writings as a Journalist. (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1990)
Book chapters
- "Slavery and Empire," in Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
- "'Aetherial Journeys, Submarine Exploits': the debatable worlds of natural history in the late eighteenth century" in Romanticism's Debatable Lands eds. C. Lamont and M. Rossington (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 223-36.
- "Post-colonialism", Romanticism: An Oxford Guide ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 237-56.
- "Henry Smeathman: The Fly-Catching Abolitionist", in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition eds. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sarah Salih (Palgrave, 2004), pp. 141-57.
- "Bulama and Sierra Leone: utopian islands and visionary interiors" in Islands in History and Representation eds. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 63-80.
- "Coleridge the Journalist" in Companion to Coleridge ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 126-41.
- "Firebrands, letters and flowers: Mrs Barbauld and the Priestleys" in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840 eds. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 82-103.
- "Re-living Jacobinism: Wordsworth and the Convention of Cintra", pp. 144-161 in The Yearbook of English Studies. Vol. 19. Modern Humanities Research Association, London. Ed. J.R. Watson. 1989. pp. 366.
Journal articles
- "Henry Smeathman and the natural economy of slavery",
- Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the British Abolition Act of 1807, eds. P. Kitson and B. Carey, in Essays and Studies 2007.
- "Entertaining Entomology: Insect Performers in the Eighteenth Century", Eighteenth-Century Life, 30.1 (Spring 2006).
- "Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire", Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 36, no. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 169-93.
- "Inscrutable history or incurable romanticism: Inga Clendinnen's Dancing with Strangers', HEAT 8 (2004): pp. 201-13.
- "Claire Clairmont and 'the tribe of the Otaheite Philosopher's'" in Women's Writing, vol 6, number 3, 1999, pp. 309-28.
- "Sierra Leone, Slavery, and Sexual Politics: Anna Maria Falconbridge and the 'swarthy daughter' of late 18th Century Abolitionism" Women's Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period (vol 2 no. 1, 1995): 3-23.
- "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790s", ELH vol. 61 (Summer, 1994): 341-62. Reprinted in Literature and Opposition, 1994 (see below) and in 'The Slave Trade in British and American Literature', Literature Criticism from 1400-1800 (Gale Group Publishers, 2000), vol 59, pp. 307-316.
Entries
- New Dictionary of National Biography, three new entries: Henrietta Mosse, Mary Ann Parker, Elizabeth Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 39, pp. 482-3; vol 42, pp. 706-7; vol. 54, p. 315.
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An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford University Press, 1999), entries on Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Abolitionism, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams, Slave Narratives, J. G. Stedman.
Linkage Grant
- "Seeing Change: Science, Culture & Technology in the Antipodes from the Age of Darwin—a multi-media research collaboration” (LP0776685). Iain McCalman, John Chappell, D. Coleman, Paul Hyland, Nigel Erskine.