Prof Ken Gelder
Professor of English
Qualifications
BA Hons, MA (Flinders), PhD (Stirling)
Biography
Ken Gelder has an M.A. (Flinders University, South Australia) and a PhD (Stirling University, Scotland). He joined the University of Melbourne in 1989 and has since taught across the Literary Studies and Cultural Studies programs in a variety of areas: from popular culture to literary theory. In 1994 and 1995 he was a Reader in English and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University, England. He teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature, popular/genre fiction and subcultural studies. His books, Reading the Vampire (1994) and Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), have helped to make him an international authority on genre fiction. The co-written Uncanny Australia (1998) - with Jane M. Jacobs (now at the University of Edinburgh) - has been especially influential, both nationally and internationally, on subsequent postcolonial work across a range of disciplines. He has also published widely on subcultures, with one reviewer of his book Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007) remarking, 'Ken Gelder is an author you can rely on for an entertaining pedagogical ride'. Ken has also co-written two Australian literary histories, covering the period 1970-2007, and is currently involved in a major research project on colonial Australian popular fiction.
Current Research
ARC Discovery Project on Colonial Australian Popular Fiction, 2007-2009.
ARC Discovery Project on Australian Fiction 1989-2005 and its National and Global Infrastructures (with Paul Salzman, La Trobe University) 2005-2007.
Currently coediting anthologies of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction and Colonial Australian Crime Fiction for MUP with Rachael Weaver, and writing a chapter on the 'Australian Gothic' for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to the Gothic.
Knowledge transfer
- editorial board, Gothic Studies
- editorial board, Journal of Horror Studies
- editorial board, Australian Humanities Review
- board of management, Meanjin, 2002-2007
- editorial board, Adaptations
- editorial board, Australian Literary Review
Teaching
- 106-110 Contemporary Literature
- 106-035 Popular Fiction
- 106-430 Subcultural Studies
Full subject descriptions are available on the University of Melbourne Handbook.
Publications
Books
- co-author (with Paul Salzman) After the Celebration: Australian Fiction
1989-2007 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, January 2009) - co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008)
- Editor, Subcultures: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge 2007). Four volumes:
- Vol 1: Subcultural Histories
- Vol 2: Chicago, Birmingham, Scenes and Communities
- Vol 3: Subcultures and Music
- Vol 4: Sexed Subjects, Virtual Communities, Neo-Tribes
- Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
- co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007)
- editor, The Subcultures Reader. Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)
- Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London and New York: Routledge, December 2004)
- editor, The Horror Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
- co-author (with Jane M. Jacobs), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998)
- co-editor (with Sarah Thornton), The Subcultures Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)
- Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), published in Italian in 1998 as Incontri Col Vampiro (Como: Red Edizione, 1998)
- Atomic Fiction: the Novels of David Ireland (St. Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press, Studies in Australian Literature series, 1993)
- editor, The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
- co-author (with Paul Salzman) The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-1988 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989)
- editor, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Scottish Stories and Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989)
Book chapters
- 'Australian Gothic', in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
- Paperback Fiction', in The International Encyclopedia of Communication, executive ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
- "The 'unAustralian' Goth: some notes towards a dislocated national subject", in Gothic and Medieval Australia, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); reprinted in Lauren Goodlad and Michael Bibby, eds., Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press, 2006).
- "Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism", From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Steven Schneider (Rodopi, Studies in Contemporary Cinema, Amsterdam, 2006).
- Foreword, Free NRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor, ed. Graham St. John (Melbourne: Common Ground, 2001).
- "The End of Australian Literature? Australian Popular Fiction and the Transnational", Australian Literary Studies in the 21st Century: Proceedings of the 2000 ASAL Conference, ed. P. Mead (Hobart: ASAL [Association for the Study of Australian Literature], 2001).
- "Aborigines and Cars", in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, eds. Sylvia Kleinart and Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- "Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema", in Adaptations: Novel to Cinema, Cinema to Novel, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, vol.118 (Farmington Hills, Michigan, The Gale Group, 2002.
Journal articles
- 'Politics, Monomania and the Rarefied World of Contemporary Australian Literary Culture', Overland, 184 (Spring 2006)
- 'When the Imaginary Australian is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History', Journal of Australian Studies 86, 2006 (special issue: Terra Incognita: New Essays in Australian Studies, eds. Leigh Dale and Margaret Henderson)
- 'Notes on the Research Future of Australian Literary Studies'. Australian Humanities Review. 37 (December 2005) http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-December-2005/Gelder.html
- 'Reading Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture, and Indigenous Philosophy'. Australian Humanities Review. 36 (July 2005) http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-July-2005/Gelder.html
- 'Us, Them and Everybody Else: Reviewing the New Humanities in Australia'. Overland. 181 (Summer 2005).
- "'Plagued by Hideous Imaginings': the Despondent Worlds of Contemporary Australian Fiction". Overland. 179 (Winter 2005).
- "Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism".Overland. 173 (Summer 2003): 21-27.
- "Haitian Voodoo as a Postcolonial Symptom". Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres (special issue on the horror genre) (forthcoming, August 2002)
- "The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian: Peter Read's Belonging as a Postcolonial 'Symptom'". Australian Humanities Review. 19 (September-November 2000). http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2000/gelder.html
- "Introduction: Global/Postcolonial Horror" and "Postcolonial Voodoo". Postcolonial Studies. 3:1 (May 2000)
- "The Obscure(d) World of Australian Popular Fiction". (La Trobe University Essay) Australian Book Review. 222 (July 2000)
- "The Trouble with Australian Literature...". AQ: Journal of Contemporary Analysis. 70:6 (December 1998)
- "The Cult of One Nation". Meanjin. 4 (December 1998)