Humanities and Social Sciences

English Program

page heading

Major research interests

• Auto/biography and life-writing: including diaries, logbooks, blogs, microblogging, memoirs, and the autographical body
• Victorian literature and culture: the intersections of Victorian science, sociology, politics, ir/religion, and literature
• Romanticism: the language of rights, empathy, humans, animals, machines.
  

Current research projects

• Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the natural history of the self (manuscript)
• Machines-humans-animals, rights, and Romanticism
• Kate Grenville and the rhetoric of empathy

Teaching areas

I co-ordinate courses at undergraduate and honours/MA levels, exploring auto/biography through reading and writing experiments. I have also taught in courses on Victorian literature, Romanticism and ecology, Jane Austen, modernity, literature and politics, the short story, and pastoral literature. I coordinate ENG1TOT Text Over Time.

Recent publications

• Degenerate and genius: inventing the synaesthete in fin-de-siècle art and science" (under review)
• "Raging against the machine: slavery and the technological sublime" (under review)
• "What shall it profit, if I write a spanking good story but lose my soul?", TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Special Issue 5 (2009) http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue5/harley.htm
• [Ed.] Bloom's Classic Critical Views: William Blake. New York: Chelsea House, 2008.
• "Sexing the Aesthete: the autobiography and apostasy of Edmund Gosse", Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 3.3 (2007). http://ncgsjournal.com/issue33/harley.htm
• '"This reversed order of things': re-orientation aboard HMS Beagle", Biography 29.3 (2006): 462-481. http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/biography/v029/29.3harley.html
• "America, A Prophecy: when Blake meets Blade Runner", Sydney Studies in English 31 (2005): 61-75. http://escholarship/usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSE/article/view/586/555
• "Remembering absense: the autobiography and apostasy of Herbert Spencer", Philament 6 (2005). http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue6_pdf/AHarley_Remembering.pdf
• Resurveying Eden: panoptica in imperfect worlds", M/C Journal 8:4 (2005). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/02-harley.php
• "Genesis, the Origin, and Darwin's autobiographies", Forum 1.1 (2005). http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue1/Harley_Darwin.pdf
• "Robert Harris' Jane, Interlinear", Southerly 61:2 (2001): 180-188.
• "Necessary Wobbles: Simon Armitage and reader-author relations", The Simon Armitage Website (2001), by invitation of Simon Armitage. http://www.smithylad.modwest.com/armo/armo_pages/reviews/wobbles1.htm

Reviews and review essays

• "Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists", Transnational Literature 1.2 (2009) http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2328/3405/1/Austen%20and%20Darwin.pdf
• Frankenstein's Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830", Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies 13.1 (2008) http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/AJVS/article/view/970
• "Baring the Rights-Man Burden: Joesph R. Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc.", M/C Reviews, 20th March, 2008. http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=New&file=article&sid=2480
• "Firing the Canon with Dorothy Wordsworth and the Ecopoem", M/C Reviews, 18th September, 2007. http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=2229