Staff profile

Dr Alison Ravenscroft

Associate Professor, Coordinator Postgraduate Studies (English)

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry

Humanities2, room 505, Melbourne (Bundoora)

 

Qualifications

BA (Hons - Melbourne), PhD (Monash).

Area of study

Australian Studies
Creative Arts
English

Brief profile

Alison Ravenscroft has been teaching since 1996 when she completed her PhD on American modernism and modernity. Before that, she was actively involved in literary publishing projects, including editing award-winning experimental fiction, and collaborating with Jackie and Rita Huggins on their award-winning auto/biography Auntie Rita (Aboriginal Studies Press 1994). Her writings on Australian neo-colonialism and its performance in reading and writing practices have been published in Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies Review, Australian Feminist Studies, Australian Humanities Review, and Auto/Biography as well as in edited collections. Her monograph The Postcolonial Eye is under contract with Ashgate. She also writes in forms outside the traditional academic ones, including ‘fiction’. In 2005 she won the Josephine Ulrich Literature Award; her short story ‘Object Lessons’ is published in Best Australian Stories (ed. Frank Moorhouse, Black Ink, 2005).

Research interests

Literary Studies

- Contemporary Australian literature

- Narrative form and representation

Literary Theory

- Cultural and critical theories

Teaching units

  • ENG2/3ALT - American literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
  • ENG2/3CFT - Contemporary feminist thought. Honours and postgraduate:
  • ENG4/5POT - The Poetics of Transgression.

Recent publications

  • The Postcolonial Eye: forthcoming 2011
  • ‘A reader becomes what she has read: reading, writing, whiteness’, in Modern Australian Criticism and Theory, edited by David Carter & Wang Guanglin, China Ocean University Press, 2010: 206-217.
  • ‘Dreaming of others: Carpentaria and its critics’, Cultural Studies Review, 16(2) 2010: 194-224.
  • ‘What falls from view?: on re-reading Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise’, Australian Literary Studies, forthcoming 2010.
  • ‘Coming to matter: the grounds of our embodied difference’, Postcolonial Studies, 10(3) September 2007: 287-300.
  • ‘Who is the white subject?’ Australian Humanities Review, 42, August 2007 http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR
  • ‘Anxieties of dispossession: whiteness, history and Australia’s war in Viet Nam’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.) Whitening Race: Essays in Cultural Criticism in Australia, Canberra, AIATSIS, 2004: 3-16.
  • ‘The girl in the picture and the eye of her beholder: Viet Nam, whiteness, and the disavowal of Indigeneity’, Continuum, Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 18 (4) December 2004: 509-524.
  • ‘Recasting Indigenous lives along the lines of western desire: editing, autobiography, and the colonising project’, A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, 19(1&2) 2004: 189-202.
  • Editor, Making us Modern: Australian Women in Modernity, special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, 18(42) November 2003.
  • ‘A picture in black and white: modernism, postmodernism and the scene of “race”’, Making us Modern: Australian Women in Modernity, special issue of Australian Feminist Studies, 18(42) November 2003: 233-244.
  • ‘”Curled up like a skinny black question mark”: the irreducibility of gender and race in Vivienne Cleven’s Bitin’ Back’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18(41) July 2003: 187-197.