Humanities and Social Sciences

English Program

Staff Profile

Main Research Areas

• The adaptation of literature to film
• Intertextuality and theories of influence
• Jane Austen and her afterlives; Janeite culture
• Book history and book illustration
• Literary scandals and censorship crises
• Stanley Cavell's writing on film and literature

Major teaching areas:

• Film adaptation
• Jane Austen
• Modern and postmodern women's writing

RECENT SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• "The Bill Henson Affair", Newsreel, Meanjin 76.3 (2008): 14.
• "Jane Austen's Abondoned Romances." Meanjin 67.2 (June 2008)
• (With John Wiltshire) "Jane Austen illustrated" in The Blackwell companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia L. Johnson and clara Tuite, blackwell, 2008.
• "Weary." In True Blue? On Being Australian, ed. Peter Goldsworthy, allen & Unwin, 2008, 106-8.
• Shakespeare's Good Daughters?" in Agamemnon's mask: Greek tragedy and beyond, ed. Terry Collits and Anjara Sharma, Macmillan, 2006.
• Introductory Note on Inchbald's Lovers' Vows for Cambridge University Press edition of Mansfield Park (ed. Wiltshire), 2005.
• "Notes on Fahrenheit 451." Cinematheque annotations of Film 2005. Senses of Cinema
• "'A consideration of times and seasons': two Jane Austen adaptations." Literature/film Quarterly 31.3 (2003): 169-176
• "Chopper, or Adventures in the Standover Trade." Metro 124/125 (2000): 88-93.
• "Thurber's My Life and Hard Times." The Explicator 58.2 (2000): 101-103.
  

Editorial and professional

• Meanjin Editorial Advisory Board member
• Member of the Jane Austen Society of Melbourne
• Co-organiser of Jane Austen & Comedy conference, La Trobe University,November 2007
• Founding editor and current contributor to Australian arts & culture weblog Sarsaparilla (2006 - present)

Selected presentations:

• "Warming the imagination with Scenes of the Past: Time-travel novels about Jane Austen", Jane Austen Society of Melbourne, August 2008
• "Looking back, reading ahead: 'free' adaptation and the pastness of Beau Travail" at the 29th annual conference of the Literature and Film Association, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, February 2004
• "Our modern pieties: Lovers' Vows, Mansfield Park, and Metropolitan." At Around Jane Austen: film, theatre, history, Melbourne, March 2002