Guest writers and speakers
Keynote Speakers and Writers:
Dr Anne Brewster
Anne BrewsterAnne Brewster is a leading writer and theorist of fictocriticism, a mode of contemporary writing which has much prominence in Australian universities, and enables strong research links with Cultural Studies, poststructuralism and feminist and race theory. Anne has published fictocriticism in the following anthologies: The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (eds. Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettelbeck); Hope and Fear: An Anthology of SA Women's Writing (eds. Annie Greet and Sue Hosking); Masks, Tapestries, Journeys (ed. Gerry Turcotte); S.E. Asia Writes Back (eds. C.Y. Loh and I.K. Ong); and in the journals Salt, TEXT and Cultural Studies Review. She has published articles on fictocritcism in Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture (eds. Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss and Amanda Nettelbeck), and Writing Teaching, Teaching Writing (eds. Jan Hutchinson and Graham Williams). She has also been invited to talk about fictocriticism in the US and Iceland. Anne’s writing has been anthologised widely and she has worked with the sound and intermedia group austraLYSIS.
Anne’s other fields of research are Indigenous writing, feminism language poetry and race and whiteness theory. She has published two books in this field, Literary Formations and Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography, and edited an anthology of Australian indigenous writing, Those who remain will always remember. Her PhD thesis was on contemporary Singaporean and Malaysian writing and she has published two books on this subject, Towards a Semiotic of Post-colonial Discourse: University Writing in Singapore and Malaysia 1949-1965, and Notes on Catherine Lim’s Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore (with Kirpal Singh). She maintains a research interest and publishes in this field. She has co-edited several anthologies of creative writing, and has produced and presented literary programs on Radio 5UV and 6NR. She is currently on the board of University of New South Wales Press, austraLYSIS and the postgraduate creative writing journal Strange. She peer reviews articles and creative writing for many journals, including Hybridity, Ariel, Cultural Studies Review, and Southern Review.
Anne is an ideal supervisor for students interested in cross-generic writing, fictocriticism, life writing, poetry and biography and those interested in feminist and race issues. She has also supervised students working in fiction, scriptwriting and memoir.
Prof Bill Ashcroft
School of English, Media and Performing Arts
BA MA Syd, PhD ANU
Research Summary
Bill Ashcroft is a founding theorist of post-colonial studies, co-author of The Empire Writes Back the first text to examine systematically and name this field of literary and cultural study. He is author and co-author of sixteen books, including four second editions, variously translated into five languages, and over 140 chapters and articles. He is on the editorial boards of ten international journals. He has been awarded a five year Australia Professorial Fellowship beginning in 2011 to work on a project entitled "Future Thinking: Utopianism in Post-colonial Literatures."
Teaching
Bill Ashcroft has taught in the Faculty since 1988. He was instrumental in developing the Australian Studies program in the Faculty, the teaching of post-colonial literary studies in the School, and has developed various forms of innovative, interdisciplinary and electronic educational initiatives. Most recently he spent three years from 2005-2008 as Chair Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong.
Innovative Teaching
• Selected in 2001 to be supported by the university to prepare and deliver a fully online General Education course, first taught in Session 2 2001.
• Selected in 2001 to be one of the inaugural ITET (Innovative Teaching and Educational Technology) Fellows. The ITET scheme was designed to prepare academics to take a leading role in the university's transformation of teaching.
• Received an Outstanding Paper Award for a paper with Iain McAlpine of EdTec delivered at the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications in 2002.
• Led a team in 2002 which received a grant in the First Year Experience scheme - developed two web-assisted, modular, collaborative first year courses, with an emphasis upon improving the First Year experience of university.
• Was nominated for a WebCt Exemplary Course Award in 2003.
Postgraduate Supervision:
• Supervised over twenty PhD graduates since 1988.
• Postgraduate coordinator in the School of English.
Undergraduate Teaching:
• Australian literature, Australian Studies, and Critical Theory, Post-colonial literatures and Theory, African, Indian and Caribbean Literatures.
• Convened the Australian Studies Program from 1988 to 1993, introducing an Australian Studies major and Australian Studies MA.
Publications
Books
1989, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. (with Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin), London and New York: Routledge
_____(1996), Korean Edition, Seoul: Minumsa Publishing
_____(1998), Chinese Edition, Beijing: Camel Publishing
_____(1998), Japanese Edition, Tokyo: English Agency
1995, The Post-colonial Studies Reader (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds.), London and New York: Routledge.
1996, The Gimbals of Unease: The Poetry of Francis Webb. Perth: CSAL.
1998, Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), London: Routledge.
1999, White and Deadly: Sugar and Colonialism. (with Pal Ahluwalia and Roger Knight, eds.), New York: Nova
1999, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (with Pal Ahluwalia) London: Routledge
_____(2000), Spanish Edition, Edward Said: La paradoja de la identidad trans. Víctor Pozanco Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra.
2001, Edward Said (with Pal Ahluwalia), London: Routledge (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
_____(2002), Arabic Edition, Idward Said: mufaraqat al-hawiyyah. (trans. Tarjamat Suhayl Najm) Damas: Ninawi, 2002).
_____(2005), Korean Edition, Edward Said Seoul: Bestun Korea Agency
_____(2006), Japanese Edition, Edward Said Tokyo: Seidosha
2001, Edward Said and the Post-Colonial (with Hussein Khadim, eds.), New York: Nova
2001, Post-Colonial Transformation London: Routledge
2001, On Post-colonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture London: Continuum
2002, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), London Routledge. [Second Edition. Completely revised with an additional chapter and Updated Readers Guide.]
_____ (2006), Arabic Edition. Arab Organisation for Translation (Routledge)
2005, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), London: Routledge [Second Edition]
2007, Post-colonial Studies: the Key Concepts (with Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin), London: Routledge. [Second Edition]
_____ (2008), Japanese Edition, Tokyo: Tuttle-Mori (Routledge)
2008, Caliban’s Voice: the Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures London: Routledge
2008, Edward Said (with Pal Ahluwalia), London: Routledge [Second Edition]
2009, Intimate Horizons: the Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature (with Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden), Adelaide: ATF Press
Dr Susan Bradley Smith
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry
Dr Susan Bradley Smith’s acadmic interests include women's theatre history, playwriting, feminist theory, life writing, Australian literature and drama, contemporary poetry, and writing and health.
Research interests
Literary Studies
- Arcadian Hells: Australian Seachange Societies
- Modern Girl: A biography of Sarah Churchill
Teaching Units
ENG2/3WRP - Writing Poetry. ENG4MML - Minds, madness and literature. ENG4RWM - Reading, writing memoirs.
Recent Publications
Books Authored:
* Dramatic Negotiations: Australian Suffrage Theatre, Anthem, London, forthcoming 2011.
* Friday Forever, Radcliffe, Oxford, forthcoming 2011.
* Super Modern Prayer Book, Salt, Cambridge, forthcoming 2010.
* Marmalade Exile, Southern Cross University Press, 2006.
* Griefbox, Salt, Cambridge, 2001.
* Playing With Ideas: Australian Women Playwrights from the Suffragettes to the Sixties (with Carolyn Pickett), Currency Press, Sydney, 1999 [theatre history].
Book Chapters:
* 'How to Kill a Labrador: Ethics and Life Writing', John Schad (ed), Critic, Sussex University Press, forthcoming 2010.
* 'David Williamson and the long grass of talent: an interview', in Making Waves: 10 years of the Byron Bay Writers Festival, (with Marele Day and Fay Knight), University of Queensland Press, 2006.
* 'Inez Bensusan, Suffrage Theatre's Nice Colonial Girl', in Elizabeth Schafer & Susan Bradley Smith (eds) Playing Australia: Australian Theatre on the World Stage, Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, 2003.
* 'Rhetoric, Reconciliation and other National Pastimes: Showcasing Contemporary Australian Theatre in London', in Elizabeth Schafer & Susan Bradley Smith (eds) Playing Australia: Australian Theatre on the World Stage, Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, 2003.
* 'Communist Women Playwrights and the Sydney New Theatre' in Xavier Pons (ed), Departures, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
* 'History and Mystery and Suffragettes on the Australian Stage: a Consideration of Women's Suffrage as Presented in Australian Theatre', in Marc Maufort (ed.), Siting the Other: Marginal Identities in Australian and Canadian Drama, Peter Lang, Bern, Brussels and New York, 2001.
* 'An Antipodean Boldness: Australian Literature and the International Curricula' in Gerhard Leitner and Bruce Bennett, eds. Australian Studies: A Topic For Tertiary Education? , Berliner Debatte Wissenschaftsverlag, 2000.
Professor Ghassan Hage
Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory
Ghassan Hage is the University of Melbourne's Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Ghassan has joined the University of Melbourne in 2008 after fifteen years of teaching and researching at the University of Sydney. As a Future Generation Professor he works at fostering inter-disciplinary research across the university.
Ghassan has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. His work fuses approaches from political economy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is a reknowned expert in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. For many years and until Bourdieu's death he was an associate researcher in the latter's research centre at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Ghassan is currently working on two ARC supported projects: The experience and circulation of political emotions concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict among Muslim immigrants in the Western world; and 'The Politics of Negotiation' as a critical way of re-conceiving inter-cultural relations. He is the author and editor of many works including White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism. His most recent work is the edited volume: Force, Movement, Intensity: The Newtonian Imagination in the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
Rudolph Bader
was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1948. At university he read English and German literatures and linguistics as well as Islamic studies and near eastern languages. He has lived and worked as a researcher and university professor in many countries including Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Australia. Under his German name he published widely in the field of postcolonial literatures, he translated Shakespeare, worked as a book reviewer and a theatre director, and he has always been very active in teacher training and in various intercultural projects.
The Prison of Perspective is Rudolph Bader’s first novel. He is already busy writing his second novel. Today, he lives in Sussex and in Switzerland.
Campbell Jefferys
It started in the hills near Perth, where he was brought rather quietly and with little fanfare into the world. The farming area tucked in the south-west corner of Western Australia became forever his reference point, but even then the world seemed broad and large, with the fields of wheat stretching to the horizon. But the whole world could not simply have been a field of wheat. There had to be more. So, a foray in the big city, slaving through low-paid jobs, struggling and then succeeding, briefly, to make a sporting career in basketball, until succumbing reluctantly to academia.
The history graduate, bored and restless, heads off to see the world. He lands a part-time job with a daily paper in a small Canadian town, convinces major newspapers he's a player on the freelance travel writing scene and manages to sell a few articles. Travels some more, hitch-hiking across America. Tries to write novels but no one is interested; not even him. Works on travel guide books, lands in Europe, settles in Germany, does the required tenure teaching English, and keeps trying to write a good book. Moves to Berlin and finally a story emerges that makes all the words fall into place.
The Bicycle Teacher was published in January 2006. His follow up novel Hunter came out in early 2009. Campbell is also the author of A Lord's Revenge, a novella for English language learners published by Compact Verlag while his articles have graced the pages of newspapers and magazines across the globe. He lives near the harbour in Hamburg and lectures at the University of Hamburg.
Publication credits
Australian Reader - short story The Cleaner
FAWWA 2008 Anthology Lines in the Sand - short story 8:26 Mill Point Road Exit
The Sunday Telegraph, London - Berlin Underground, Potsdam Palaces, Innsbruck
The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Mountains on the March
The West Australian, Perth
The Courier Mail, Brisbane
Travel Intelligence, London - Travel Articles
Here or There, London - Travel Stories
Itchy Traveller, Singapore
The Local, Germany - Hamburg, Australian Football, Sexy St Pauli, Sylt, Harz Mountains, Goslar
Decanter Magazine - Mosel
Living Now Magazine - Digital Enlightenment
Spotlight Magazine - short stories: The Mix-up (January 2009), Connectivity (November 2009)
Dalango - scripts for English learning videos
Hemispheres Inflight Magazine - Love Bugs
Adventure Magazine
Owners Perspective Magazine
BeE Magazine
European Journal - Auschwitz
Backpackers Travel Magazine
Scuba Diver Australasia
Rough Guides for USA, Europe and Germany
Expedia
Road Junky - Guide to Germany
Italy from a Backpack - short story Guidebook as Gospel
The Louisiana Weekly, New Orleans
The Nelson Daily News, Nelson, Canada
Music
A Cast of Millions - Vegas