Staff
Head of School
Professor Jill Matthews
History of modernity, sexuality, popular culture especially silent and pornographic film, Australian social and cultural history, feminist history.
Academic staff
Areas of interest are listed below, for detailed research profiles click on the staff name.
Art History and Curatorship
Professor Sasha Grishin
Nineteenth and twentieth century art, especially Australian and European art; Medieval art, especially Byzantine and Russian art; art theory and curatorship.
Dr Michelle Antoinette
Modern and contemporary Asian art history especially of Southeast Asia; cross-cultures and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary art, including Asian-Australian visual art; curatorship, museum and gallery studies, including exhibitions and collecting.
Dr Elisabeth Findlay
Elisabeth's main research field is in the history of portraiture, specialising in Australian colonial portraiture. She is particularly interested in issues surrounding the construction of identity and how a portrait is used to convey power and status. She focuses on the portrait in terms of a complex web of the aspirations of the patron, sitter, artist and the audience.
Dr Charlotte Galloway
Asian art, particularly the Buddhist art of Burma; curatorial studies.
Dr Andrew Montana
Australian and international art; nineteenth-century visual culture; theatre arts; theories of ornament and design; exhibitions and interpretation.
Dr Caroline Turner
Contemporary Asian and Pacific art, especially Japan and Indonesia; museums and museology; art and human rights; cultural diplomacy.
Classics and Ancient History
Dr Paul Burton
Roman history of the middle and late Republican periods; Roman imperialism and diplomacy; the Classical tradition.
Dr Peter Londey
Australian and international peacekeeping; history of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles; regional history and historical memory in Central Greece (Delphi and Phokis); warfare and society in ancient Greece from 6th to 4th centuries BC; cultural responses to peace keeping, especially art of George Gittoes; Charles Bean and military commemoration in Australia.
Professor Elizabeth Minchin
The Homeric epics as oral poetry: the composition of the Homeric epics; Homer and memory; Homer's narrative; the speech Homer attributes to his characters; social memory and the region of the Dardanelles.
Dr Ioannis Ziogas
Latin poetry of the Augustan period (Vergil and Ovid); Roman comedy (Plautus and Terence); Greek epic; reception studies.
English
Dr Ian Higgins
Literature and politics; early modern and eighteenth-century literature; British imperial fiction and poetry.
Dr Katherine Bode
Australian literature, including contemporary writing and literary and cultural history; gender studies, especially masculinity studies; history of the book, publishing and reading; studies of reading and reception; digital humanities/eResearch approaches to literary studies, including data- and text-mining and quantitative literary history.
Ms Rebecca Clifford
Theatre history, dramatic theory and practice, Australian drama with a specific focus on metatheatre.
Dr Ned Curthoys
Comparative literature studies with a focus on the work of Edward Said and the émigré literary critics Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer; Albert Camus and Algeria; the concept of 'character' in literary theory and ethics; theories of cosmopolitanism; German Jewish intellectual history from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the political theory of Hannah Arendt; the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.
Dr Debjani Ganguly
Debjani's areas of specialization are postcolonial literary and historical studies and comparative/world literatures in the era of globalization. Her other areas of research and publication include, language politics in postcolonial India, dalit life stories, South Asian diasporic fiction, cultural histories of mixed race, and the globalization of Bollywood, the popular cinema from Bombay/Mumbai as creative industry.
Dr Simon Haines
Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and philosophy; seventeenth century English poetry and philosophy; literature and moral philosophy; literature and political philosophy; the self in literature; comparative literature; history of ideas; modern literary theory.
Dr Julieanne Lamond
Australian literature and cultural history, 19th Century to present; book history, readers and audiences; empirical/eResearch approaches to reading history; film, especially production and reception; literature and politics; popular fiction and culture.
Dr Kate Mitchell
Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction; historical fiction, especially contemporary British and Australian; 19th and 20th century literary and cultural history; cultural memory; theory and philosophy of History.
Ms Lucy Neave
Fiction writing, and the writing process; writing and new media; writing pedagogy.
Dr Monique Rooney
US literature and film; African-American literature; twentieth-century Australian film, with particular interests in melodrama, theories of race and sexuality, film and spectatorship theory.
Professor Gillian Russell
British eighteenth-century and romantic studies, focussing on theatre, gender, sociability and public culture, Jane Austen.
Dr Russell Smith
Samuel Beckett; literary theory, especially theories of affect, emotion & subjectivity; contemporary Australian writing, particularly concerning representations of place and space; contemporary visual art.
Dr Shameem Black
Contemporary literature in English, fiction and transitional justice, humanitarianism, representational ethics, globalization, cross-cultural literature, crisis narratives.
Film and New Media
Dr Gino Moliterno
Contemporary Italian cinema; Italian-Australian cinema; film adaptation; Dante; Renaissance Literature and Philosophy.
Dr Roger Hillman
Film and history, film and music, European cinema, modern European literature.
Dr Cathie Summerhayes
New media/audiovisual studies, documentary studies, cultural studies and theatre/performance studies: with a specific focus on relationships between creative practice and narrative/cultural meanings available in audiovisual communication; the analysis of cinemedia: television, cinema and new media in the context of critical theory, theatre and performance theory.
Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Dr Rosanne Kennedy
Trauma, memory and witnessing in Australia and transnational contexts; Holocaust studies; Stolen Generations; life-writing studies; feminist theory;cultural theory; literary theory; 19th and 20th century novel; women writers; law and literature; gender and modernity.
Dr Gaik Cheng Khoo
My research interests revolve around food, film and culture.
1. Food: Peranakan culture and identity and the Little Nyonya tv series in Malaysia and Singapore.
2. Film: exploring space and everyday life in independent Malaysian films
3. Culture: focusing on the rise of constitutional patriotism in Malaysian civil society and independent viral film projects as 'acts of citizenship'.
Visiting Fellows
Please see the Visiting Fellows and School Visitors page
