Bulletin

Issue: April 2005

News

Elevation to Professor

La Trobe University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Michael Osborne, has announced the appointment of two senior academic staff members as full professors.

They are Harry Clarke, Head of the Department of Economics and Finance who has been appointed to the Chair of Economics and Sue Thomas, appointed Professor of English in the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry.

Harry Clarke
Professor Clarke, who has a BA (Economics) (Hons 1) from Macquarie University, a MEc (Economics) and a PhD (Economics), both from ANU, was Reader/Associate Professor in Economics and Head of Department of Economics and Finance before his appointment.

His previous appointments include Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies), Faculty of Law and Management and Senior Lecturer in Economics, La Trobe University, and Associate Professor of Industrial Economics, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok.

Professor Clarke has held visiting appointments at the University of Illinois, USA; University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; and The University of Melbourne. He was employed as a Visiting Professor of Economics, Infrastructure Planning and Management Division, at the Asian Institute of Technology.

His research interests are in the areas of microeconomics, public policy, resource and environmental economics, and business economics (game theory, strategy and organisation).

He has published over 90 refereed publications, including
46 high quality internationally-refereed publications in a number of fields in microeconomics, business economics and operations research.

Professor Clarke has received awards from the International Association of Energy Economists and the Australian Agricultural Economics Society.

He teaches mainly in microeconomics, business economics and in public policy.

Sue Thomas
Professor Thomas’s research and teaching ranges across decolonising literatures, nineteenth and twentieth century women’s writing, feminist theory and theories of cultural and literary decolonisation, historical reading practices, and histories of racial thinking, including “whiteness” as a historical racial category.

She has a particular interest in West Indian literature and the transculturation of modernism. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Queensland.

She is the author of The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), co-author (with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi) of England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001).

Professor Thomas has published eight titles in the Victorian Fiction Research Guides series, including Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952): A Bibliography (1994), is the author of around 60 essays in books and refereed journals, and editor of The Suffragettes (forthcoming in the Thoemmes/Continuum set Anti-Feminism in Edwardian Literature, ed. by Ann Heilmann and Lucy Delap).

Currently she is completing an Australian Research Council funded book project Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre and an edited anthology of primary documents on gender and Anglo-imperialism in the nineteenth-century West Indies for Routledge’s History of Feminism series.

The latter project has been funded by a British Academy Visiting Professorship in 2004, an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship in 2001, shared Central Large Grants in 2004 and 2005, and shared Research Enhancement Fund grants from the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry.

She is on the editorial boards of New Literatures Review, The Jean Rhys Review, Postcolonial Studies, and the Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and referees articles for quite a few international postcolonial and feminist journals.

Professor Thomas has taught English at La Trobe since 1986. She was Coordinator of the English Program in 2001 and 2002. From 1980 to 1985 she taught in the Division of External Studies at the University of Queensland.

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