Humanities and Social Sciences

English Program

Staff Directory

Major research areas:

• Social learning
• Psychoanalytic and Literary Theory
• Literature and Medicine
• Race and family

Major Teaching Areas:

• Feminist Theory
• Psychoanalytic theory
• Body Theory

Recent Publications include:

Edited Book

The Fertile Imagination: Narratives of Reproduction: a Special Edition of Meridian (with Maggie Kirkman and JaneMaree Maher), Vol 18, No. 2, 2002.

Articles and Chapters in Books:

• 'Virtual connections: technologies of reproduction, culture and the growth of love in some contemporary fiction'. Women and Technologies of Reproduction: A Special Issue of Women's Studies International Forum. Ed. Maggie Kirkman and jane Fisher. volume 31, issue 4 July-August, 2008, 235-240.
• "Mothering Siblings: Constructions of Motherhood in Indo-Diasporic Cinema'. 50% with Ira Raja. Narrative. Vol. 16, No. 1, 2008, 16-28.
• 'She our Gudja: Representations of mothering, race and relatedness in some Aboriginal autobiography', Australia-- Who Cares , ed. David Callahan, Network Books, Perth , 2007, 203-215.
• Loss, Losing it and the Tragicomic Performative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett'. Agamemnon's mask: Greek Tragedy and Beyond, ed. Anjana Sharma and Terry Collits, Macmillan, India New Delhi, 2007, 315-326.
• '"It's much easier to get help for the baby": Women and postpartum health'. 50% with JaneMaree Maher, in Health Sociology Review , Volume 15/1-2, 2006, 104-111.
• 'Keeping all your balls in the air: Fictions of Fatherhood in Barbara Trapido's Juggling Trilogy'. Sperm Wars , ed. Heather Grace Jones and Maggie Kirkman, ABC Books, Melbourne and Sydney , 2005, 264-273.
• 'Heads and Arms and Legs Enough: Jane Austen and Sibling Dynamics', Persuasions 26, 2005, 176-187.
• 'Raising Hell: Intergenerational Trouble in the Life-Writings of Martin Amis and Lorna Sage', Psychoanalysis Downunder, The Online Journal of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, Issue 5, 2004. http://www.psychoanalysisdownunder.com/PADPapers/papers.htm.
• 'Lost in Culture', Psychoanalysis Downunder, The Online Journal of the Australian Psychoanalytical Society, Issue 4, 2003. http://www.psychoanalysisdownunder.com/PADPapers/papers.htm.
• 'Jessica Benjamin', Key Contemporary Social Theorists, ed. Anthony Elliot and Larry Ray, Oxford , Blackwells, 2003, 58-64.

Recent conference papers include:

• 'Social Learning and Second Life'. Open University and Cambridge International Conference on Open and Distance Learning, Cambridge UK , September 2007.
• 'Educational Uses of Second Life: an Overview'. ACODE Learning Technologies Leadership Institute Workshop, Kingsville , NSW, August 2007.
• 'Live Places: online learning as transitional space in the delivery of a large multi-campus subject'. IRU Australia Learning and Teaching Forum, Flinders University , September 2006.
• 'Between two worlds: a narrative of the split self', Past the Post Conference, University of Delhi, December 2005,.
• 'The Mother and the Boy with the Missing Lung: Absence, Speech, and the Battlefield in the work of W.R. Bion' Bion Today Conference, London , June 2005.
• 'Still Crazy After All These Years', What's Love Got to Do with It? Australian Association of Marriage and Family Counselors Conference, March 2005.
• 'Bion and the Battlefield', Monash University , Bridging Solitude Seminar, 20 October 2005.
• 'Persuasion, fashion victims and the imprisonment on Elba .' Napoleonic Society, 29 July 2005.
• 'Mothering Siblings: Constructions of Motherhood in South Asian-American Cinema', Monash University Women's Studies seminar, September 2004.
• 'Bion's War memoirs', Beyond the Theoretical Revolution: teaching and researching in Literary Studies Today Seminar, Lady Shri Ram College , University of Delhi , September 2004.
• '"I never recovered from survival": Nameless dread and the battlefield in the work of W.R. Bion', Culture and the Unconscious Conference, University of East London/Tavistock Institute, London, July 2004.
• 'It's Easier to get Help for the Baby: Post-partum Narratives', Key Centre for Women's Health in Society Seminar Series, Melbourne September 2004.
• 'Losing it: Narrative control and interpersonal turbulence', Why We Laugh Symposium', La Trobe University, October 2003
• 'She our Gudja: Representations of mothering, race and relatedness in some Aboriginal autobiography' EASA Conference, Aveiro, September 2003.
• 'Remembering Home: Intersubjectivity, Embodiment and Emplacement', Place, Memory, Identities: Australia , Spain and the New World, La Trobe Barcelona Conference, Melbourne, July 2003.
• 'Think, Linking and Reformulating the Real', Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic psychotherapists Professional Development Seminars, May 5 2003.
• 'Passion and the sacred texts: Fundamentalism in theory and practice', Scientific meeting, Victorian Association of Psychoanalytic Psychologists, 18 March 2003.