Event Recordings
Alexandra Dane, Beth Driscoll, Sandra Phillips and Kim Wilkins on Community Publishing in Regional Australia: Writing, Editing, Distributing and Marketing
This presentation offers findings from two years of fieldwork in Alice Springs/Mparntwe, Broken Hill/Willyama, Winton (on the lands of the Koa people) and Ayr (on the lands of the Bindal people). Drawing on interviews with authors who are writing and publishing their own work, it explores the production process from writing and editing, to distributing and marketing.
Dr Keyvan Allahyari, University of Jena, on (De-)colonial Blues: Waterborne Method and the Inter-discipline’s Resource Frontiers
In this presentation, Dr Keyvan talks about the ways that Australian literature, in particular First Nation literature, can trouble water as a theoretical device in literary humanities by reverting it to its function as colonial resource frontier.
Associate Professor Adelle Sefton-Rowston on the representations and experiences of refusal, beauty and kindness in prisons to demonstrate new possibilities for justice reform.
Adelle is a senior Fulbright scholar and lectures in Literary Studies at Charles Darwin University. She teaches creative writing in Darwin Correctional Precinct, and in 2022, taught in several correctional facilities across Alabama. Adelle is a published poet, essayist, critic, and magazine editor. Her research focuses on writing about, for, and within prisons, with the view that these literary archetypes offer new paradigms for justice reform. Her debut book is titled Polities and Poetics: race relations and reconciliation in Australian literature.
Dr Mykaela Saunders on First Nations speculative fiction as an exciting field of literature that began small and slow in 1990 but has exploded exponentially in recent years.
Mykaela is a Koori/Goori and Lebanese writer, critic and editor. Her speculative fiction collection, Always Will Be (2024), won the David Unaipon Award, was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Fiction) and NSW Literary Awards Indigenous Writers’ Prize, longlisted for the Stella Prize and Highly commended for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at Macquarie University researching First Nations speculative fiction. Mykaela worked in Aboriginal education in various capacities from 2003 to 2023 and has been teaching at the tertiary level since 2012. Her research explores her people’s past, present and future.
Dr Meg Brayshaw on finding gold in the literary history of mining in North Queensland: The politics and pleasures of reading Sarah Campion’s Burdekin trilogy in place
Dr Brayshaw is the John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Broadly interested in the intersection of literary cultures and forms with history, politics, and the environment, she has published on a range of topics including Australian modernism, urban literature, melodrama, crime fiction, and the Anthropocene as narrative form. She is currently working on two projects: a literary history of mining in Australia, and a monograph on Dymphna Cusack and Australian realism during the Cold War. At Sydney University Press, she is academic editor of the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.
Dr Dashiell Moore on the blackbirding archipelago in Australian and Pacific literatures
Throughout history, islands have been physically and imaginatively constructed as a site of enforced isolation beyond a mainland territory: for quarantine, incarceration, and indefinite detainment. Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s concept of archipelagic thought, Dr Moore asks, under what conditions can we identify connections between islands of containment?
Dr Keyvan Allahyari, Dr Meg Brayshaw, Dr Dashiell Moore and Associate Professor Roger Osborne discuss Australian literature, literary history, and environmental humanities: Current perspectives, future possibilities
Associate Professor Roger Osborne speaks to Roderick Centre Fellows, Dr Keyvan Allahyari, Dr Meg Brayshaw and Dr Dashiell Moore about how the projects they are undertaking at James Cook University speak to the present and future of Australian literary studies. Working on water and borders, the literary history of mining, and carceral sites and narratives, Keyvan, Meg and Dashiell respond to questions that unite their research and animate key disciplinary debates today, including: How does attention to the agency of the non-human augment Australian literature’s traditional preoccupation with place? How do we maintain attention to the specifics of the local and regional while also ensuring we speak to and engage with the global? How does archival work contribute to research-led teaching? Is literary history still the dominant methodological mode of Australian literary studies, and how does a commitment to decolonisation augment that approach?
Dr Robert Clarke discusses everything from book clubs to BookToks: Old and new Ways of Engaging with Australian Literature
In this public talk, Dr Clarke considers some of the most enduring as well as the most recent ways that readers engage with Australian literature. Against the perception that the study of Australian literature in schools and universities is in decline, the evidence from reader activities in book clubs, online forums, and libraries seems to tell a different story. This presentation considers some of the forces that are at play and that will likely shape the culture of reading around Australian literature in the years to come.
Emeritus Professor Philip Mead view on Australian Literary Studies
Emeritus Professor Philip Mead offers a personal perspective on the current state of Australian literary studies both as project in its own right and as a subset of the larger field of literary studies. The study of Australian literature had an understandably national focus at its outset and that’s been both an asset and a liability. There’s always been a tension between valuing writing by Australian writers and the effects of ‘nationalism’. The same is true today, though in different and important ways.
Dr Rose Michael discusses speculative fiction and real world research
Dr Rose Michael, researcher and author, discusses real world research as inspiration for speculative fiction. Senior Lecturer in writing and publishing at RMIT, Rose Michael has published speculative fiction in Island, Griffith Review, Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Antipodes, and speculative criticism in TEXT, The Conversation, Sydney Review of Books and Reading Like an Australian Writer. Her first novel, The Asking Game, was a runner-up for the Vogel and received an Aurealis honourable mention; an early extract from her second, The Art of Navigation, was shortlisted for a Conjure award; her third, Else, has received funding from the Copyright Agency, City of Melbourne, and Creative Victoria.
Professor Jo Winning at the Regions, Humanities, Wellbeing Symposium 2024
Professor Jo Winning speaking at the 'Regions, Humanities, Wellbeing: The Relationship Between Humanities and Communities in the Regions' symposium at JCU's Cairns Institute on 18 and 19 July 2024. Jo Winning is Professor of Modern Literature & Critical Theory, and Head of School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, in the Faculty of Arts at Monash. Before joining Monash last July, she was Professor of Modern Literature & Critical Theory in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She is Vice-President of the Association for Medical and Healthcare Humanities and has worked in the field of medical humanities with clinical and academic colleagues for 13 years. Her research and teaching sit at the interfaces between literary studies, critical theory, clinical practice, and medical education.
Professor Javier Duran speaking at the Regions, Humanities, Wellbeing Symposium, 2024
Javier Duran (PhD) is Professor of Latin-American and Border Studies at the Center for Latin American Studies and the founding director of the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona. He is a specialist in cultural and interdisciplinary studies along the U.S.-Mexico border and a native of the Arizona-Sonora desert region. Dr. Duran’s areas of teaching and research include U.S.-Mexico border studies, Latin American Cultural Studies, Mexican women’s literature and culture, and Chicana/Chicano-Latina/Latino narrative. He is the author of the book José Revueltas. Una poética de la disidencia, published by the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico, five co-edited books on Cultural Studies, and numerous articles on literary and cultural themes.
Professor Alistair Noble
Alistair Noble is a pianist, composer, and musicologist. He is currently Head of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of New England. He was formerly Lecturer and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Visiting Professor at NTNU Taipei, and Dean at the Australian Institute of Music. Alistair has performed extensively in recital around Australia and made many broadcasts for the national (ABC) radio. His compositions have been performed, recorded and broadcast in Australia, Europe, and North America. His analytical research on the music of US composer Morton Feldman is published by Ashgate/Routledge. Current projects include a large-scale collaborative musical work resulting from an artist's residency at Wilsons Downfall, in southern Queensland, to be performed in August 2024.