HDR Projects
Jade Croft (MPhil Candidate)
Reading/Telling Stories of Compounded Disadvantage: Regional Perspectives in Novels and Memoirs of Higher Education
This project aims to contribute new knowledge by drawing together literary studies and higher education research to explore the ways literary knowledge may offer new regional perspectives to the ongoing discourse of widening participation in higher education. Through its exploration of a number of Australian and global memoirs and fictional narratives that provide insight into the experiences of regionally based individuals who engage with higher education, this research hopes to provide nuanced perspectives and examples of the complex and overlapping challenges regional students experience when they choose to pursue university. It also posits that these narratives provide insight into the intricate processes of identity formation and transformation that regional students experience during their journeys to and through higher education. The primary research question that this thesis will investigate is: What exactly is regionality, as a category of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in higher education, and how can we better understand the impact of regionality on a person’s journey into and through higher education by studying novels and memoirs that centre their lived experience? To further specify what aspects of a regional person’s higher education journey this thesis focuses upon, two sub-questions shape its approach: What is the nature of intersecting and compounded disadvantage for regional students, and how do these challenges manifest in regional students’ lives and pursuits of HE? What are the positive and negative processes of identity formation and transformation at play in a regional student’s life and educational journey?
Dr Agnieszka Dziakowska (PhD Awarded March 2025)
Violence in the Tropical Pacific: The Capacities and Limits of Narrative to Address Global Social Inequality
From the first voyages of exploration, European narratives have portrayed the tropical Pacific as an erotic and feminised space of conquest. These narratives can be considered a kind of violence, particularly against women. Postcolonial writers from the Pacific have actively attempted to overcome these kinds of narrative misrepresentations. Yet violence is not just discursive: gendered violence, especially against women, is a serious and pervasive problem throughout the Oceanic region. Focusing on gendered violence in poetry, prose, and some media in all three areas of the Pacific—Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, with an emphasis on Samoa, this comparative literature project considers how narratives about gendered violence in the tropical Pacific seek to overcome both historical violence and contemporary silences to offer the possibility of empowerment. Inquiring into the capacities and limits of writing about gendered violence across this diverse region, this thesis highlights the significant role poetry has offered female writers in the tropical Pacific as a means to raise complex and often unspeakable subjects and bring them into the public sphere. It also reflects upon the more limited role played by prose narratives, particularly by women writers who have some relationship to the Pacific diaspora. Finally, the thesis draws attention to some other contemporary forms of narrative in the region, such as online activism, noting the way these kinds of narratives are circumscribed by cultural dynamics. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that literature, and in particular poetry, is a powerful form of speaking out against gendered violence in a region where being open about such matters is a complex undertaking.
Bethany Keats (PhD Candidate)
Finding Judith: Fiction, Family History and Unravelling the Past
Bethany Keats is a part-time PhD student in Creative Writing and History. She is investigating the use of gothic literature to explore and communicate critical family histories, with a focus on women, using her grandparents’ divorce in Tamworth in the 1950s as a case study. She is also a co-editor of Sūdō Journal, co-host of the podcast Edits & Annotations, and a director of the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies (FALS).
Bianca Martin (PhD Candidate)
Narrative Activism: Sexual Violence Representations in Experimental Life Writing Since #MeToo
The #MeToo movement has provided a framework of collective testimony through which to read and understand contemporary narrative about sexual violence. This project seeks to understand how we can use #MeToo as a lens through which to read and understand contemporary sexual violence narratives in experimental modes of life writing, and how these texts might be read as narrative activism by deploying the values and intentions of the movement to further promote social change. I aim to highlight the transformative power of public storytelling as a key mode of social engagement, something #MeToo demonstrated through its overwhelming collective testimony by people sharing their stories using the hashtag. To do this I will develop the ‘#MeToo lens’ as a conceptual tool for textual analysis and demonstrate its application. I will achieve this through the close reading of key works of experimental life writing, drawing on feminist theory, trauma studies, affect theory, and narratology to identify where representations of sexual violence promote values and concepts core to #MeToo.
Tenille McDermott (PhD Candidate)
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Perception of Time in Narrative Fiction
Tenille’s practice-led creative writing project uses Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of time and narrative in conjunction with machine learning and natural language programming to explore, among other aspects of temporality and its depiction in narrative, the time-haunted nature of machine-generated text. This research informs the composition of a novel that will incorporate machine-generated text as a means of exploring the way human experiences of time are read and ordered through narrative.
Rafaela Novelli (PhD Candidate)
Writers Who Edit and Editors Who Write: An Exploration of Writer-Editor Identity and Creative Processes in Romance Fiction
In her research, Rafaela aims to use evidence of editorial processes in genre fiction to explore how ideas of authorship and professional identity impact the creative processes practised by romance fiction writers and editors. Writing and editing are often viewed as distinct phases of the writing process and distinct professional practices. Yet, creative writers often engage in editing processes, and editors, likewise, find themselves writing or creating. Much literary analysis focuses on the author as the sole creator. However, the editor plays a significant role as a collaborator and creator.
Rafaela’s research will explore a selection of contemporary Australian romance fiction case studies. It will also include reflections on her own professional practice as a Cairns-based editor and writer of this genre. Rafaela is interested in seeing what can be learned from traversing and engaging in both professions or the ‘borderlands’ between them. She hopes her research will add to the growing field of Australian publishing and literary studies supported by the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing.
Melissa Robertson (MPhil Candidate)
Capturing Creative Moments in a Magazine: a decade of milestones and creative achievements showcased and supported through the lens of a community-driven magazine.
By analysing the contents of the magazine, evaluating the impact on those that contributed and were featured in the magazine and reflecting on the topics discussed and arts practise showcased in each edition, this project will argue the case of how important magazines like Arts Nexus are to those that are contained within the pages.
Exploring the 65 editions of the magazine Arts Nexus that chronicled the arts, culture, and creative industries of Far North Queensland to the broader community from 1998 – 2008, this project will analyse the significant impact the magazine had. By spotlighting the achievements of the Arts and Cultural sector, the Arts Nexus association members, pointing to their success, promoting their dreams and creative products, sharing knowledge and provided a place for peer review.
The magazine documented the evolution of a vibrant arts, cultural and creative industry sector and provided a sense of pride and confidence in their creative pursuits. Arts Nexus is a testament to the tenacity of a remote sector that was determined to be counted in the national ecology.
Chelsea Roles (PhD Candidate)
Australian Women and True Crime: A Poetic Perspective
This project explores the intersection of feminist theory and true crime through poetry as a biographical writing tool. By engaging with feminist theory and life writing studies, this research investigates how poetry can challenge dominant narratives about women and crime. The goal is to create a collection of poetry focused on notable female Australian true crime figures, reinterpreting their stories to disrupt limited, sexist portrayals often found in mainstream narratives. These women are typically depicted in binary terms, as either victims or perpetrators, which simplifies and distorts their complex lives. This project aims to humanise these figures, creating ambiguity around labels like "victim" and "murderer" and inviting readers to re-evaluate the established narratives surrounding them.
Traditional biographies focus on chronological facts, while poetry offers a more nuanced, interpretive approach, delving into the emotional and psychological depths of its subjects. Through lyric poetry, this project seeks to uncover overlooked aspects of these women's lives, revealing the power dynamics, violence, and societal expectations that shaped them. By examining true crime through the lens of life narrative and feminist theory, this project will challenge traditional historical narratives and offer a nuanced feminist perspective of these women, with the hopes of contributing to a broader understanding of both historical and literary representations of women and crime.
Lillian White (MPhil candidate)
Living landscapes in Far North Queensland
This project investigates the role of speculative fiction to imagine how future law could impact social and cultural relationships with the environment in the Wet Tropics of Queensland. The creative practice component of this research is a short story cycle that responds to the question ‘what if landscapes had legal personhood?’. The short stories will be set in the Wet Tropics, a cultural landscape rich with biodiversity and under immediate threat of destruction due to deforestation and climate change. These stories will imagine a near future in which treaties have been signed and the sovereign Indigenous Peoples’ beliefs about living entities in the landscape are incorporated into legislation, giving these beings legal personhood. This recognises the Indigenous Peoples’ spiritual sovereignty over natural features such as rivers and mountains and gives these places equivalent rights to humans. The stories will be told from the perspective of non-Indigenous characters, exploring how this legal change could affect non-Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the environment. This short story cycle will be in the genres of eco-fiction and speculative fiction. The creative work will be informed by an ecocritical analysis of leading examples of Australian eco-fiction, speculative fiction and the short story cycle. This critical analysis will distil effective literary techniques for creative writers to imagine the social and cultural impacts of future environmental law through speculative fiction.
Johanna Wiggers, (MPhil Candidate)
Searching for the German Modern Girl: Literary Representations of Womanhood and the Fate of Weimar Women Writers 1920s – 1930s
This project investigates the fate of the German Modern Girl, or Neue Frau, and her writer, during and after the period associated with the Weimar Republic. Since 2008, when Alys Weinbaum and co-authors published The Modern Girl Around the World, literary critics throughout the Anglophone world have recovered the lost literary record and voices of flappers and bright young things in ways that have significantly fleshed out the record of high modernist literature that, retrospectively, has most often been taught and preserved as the cultural record of the interwar period. This record has only recently been expanded in “Searching for the Modern Girl” (Kuttainen and Lippmann 2022) to include Australian Modern Girl literature, and some German Modern Girl literature (Buhl 2022). The project of searching for the German Modern Girl is incomplete. My project proposes to consider the German Modern Girl novels of Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun, to investigate the links between the fate their Modern Girl characters faced and the ultimate fate, and reputation of these writers, so well-known in their day, and so obscured by history.