Staff profile
Professor Sue Thomas
Professor of English
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
School of Communication, Arts and Critical EnquiryHU2 531, Melbourne (Bundoora)
Qualifications
MA (Qld), PhD (Qld).
Membership of professional Associations
Australian Association for Caribbean Studies. Australasian Victorian Studies Association. Australian Modernist Studies Network.
Area of study
English
Creative Arts
Brief Profile
Professor Sue Thomas’s recent research ranges across decolonising literatures; nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing; and histories of representation of racial difference, including ‘whiteness’ as a historical racial category. In the field of decolonising literatures her special areas of interest are Caribbean writing, the transculturation of modernism, and transcultural and transhistorical textual traffic. Her scholarship is highly attentive to historical and cultural contexts, and histories of genre and representation. She is a member of the editorial boards of Postcolonial Studies and New Literatures Review and of the National Advisory Board of the Australian Modernist Studies Network.
Research interests
Literary Studies
- Historical approaches to Caribbean literature
- Literary texts across cultures and media
- Nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing
Literary Theory
- Modernism, colonialism and decolonisation
Teaching Units
ENG1TCV - Text, Criticism and the Visual. ENG2/3REM - Resituating Modernism.
Recent Publications
Current books
Thomas, S 2008, Imperialism, Reform and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills and New York.
Thomas, S (ed.) 2008, Victorian Traffic: Identity, Performance, Exchange, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Thomas, S, Blake, A & Gandhi, L 2001, England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Palgrave, Houndmills and New York.
Thomas, S 1999, The Worlding of Jean Rhys, Greenwood, Westport, CT and London.
Essays in books
Thomas, S forthcoming, ‘Anne Hart Gilbert’s Early Christian Biographies’, in Anim-Addo, J ed, Writing, Diaspora and the Legacies of Slavery, Mango, London
Thomas, S, Carroll, L, Palmer, C & Waese, R forthcoming, ‘Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Roger Michell’s Persuasion in the University Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies’, in Bloom, A & Sanders-Pollock, M ed. Adaptation: British Literature of the Nineteenth Century and Film, Cambria Press, Amherst, NY.
Thomas, S 2009, ‘A Balance of Stories’, in Satpathy, S ed., Southern Postcolonialisms: The Global South and the ‘New’ Literary Representations, Routledge New Delhi, New Delhi, pp. 3-16.
Thomas, S 2007, ‘Pathologies of Sexuality, Empire and Slavery: D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte’, in Rubik, M & Mettinger-Schartmann, E ed., A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, Rodopi, Amsterdam, pp. 101-114.
Thomas, S 2006 ed. The Suffragettes, in Heilmann, A & Delap, L ed. Anti-Feminism in Edwardian Literature, vol. 3, Thoemmes Continuum/Edition Synapse, Bristol, iv + 71 pp.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘V.S. Naipaul’, in Schwarz, B ed. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 228-247.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘Rewriting the Hysteric as Anorexic in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions’, in Heller, T & Moran, P ed. Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 183-198.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘Elizabeth Robins, the “New Woman” Novelist, and the Writing of Literary Histories of the 1890s’, in Heilmann, A ed, Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century, Pandora, London, pp. 124-137, 221-225.
Articles in refereed journals
Thomas, S 2007, ‘Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre’, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 57-79.
Thomas, S 2006, ‘The spectre of “an empty bed”: Debbie Shewell’s More Than One Antoinette’, in Roblin, I & Perry, A ed., Jane Eyre: Past and Present, LISA e-journal, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 131-143.
Thomas, S 2006, ‘Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread and the Spectre of Leprosy in Antigua and Britain 1889-1891’, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol 4, no. 1, 12pp.
Thomas, S 2005, ‘Crying “the horror” of prostitution: Elizabeth Robins’s “Where Are You Going To …?” and the Moral Crusade of the Women’s Social and Political Union’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 203-221.
Thomas, S 2005, ‘Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Trials over The History of Mary Prince’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 113-135.
Thomas, S 2004, ‘Remembering Catherine Whitfield, Ann King and Betty Jackson: Jean Rhys and Kamau Brathwaite’s Slave Sublime’, Atlantic Literary Review, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 146-163.
Thomas, S 2004, ‘Jean Rhys Writing White Creole Childhoods’, in Freadman, R & Gatt-Rutter, J ed. Life-writing and the Generations, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 19, nos. 1-2, pp. 203-221.
Thomas, S 2004, ‘Jean Rhys’s Cardboard Doll’s Houses’, Kunapipi, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 39-53.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘Thinking through “[t]he grey disease of sex hatred”: Jean Rhys’s “Till September Petronella”’, in Emery, ME ed. Jean Rhys, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 77-90.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘The Suffragettes: Scandal English Style’, New Literatures Review, no. 39, pp. 37-58.
Thomas, S 2003, ‘Scenes in the Writing of “Constance Lytton and Jane Warton, Spinster”: Contextualizing a Cross-Class Dresser’, in Heilmann, A ed. Words as Deeds: Literary and Historical Perspectives on Women’s Suffrage, Women’s History Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 51-71.
Research projects
Anglophone Caribbean (auto)biography, plantation slavery, and the traffic of colonial reform and modernisation, 1807-1834
Polly Teale’s late expressionist theatreTravels of Jane Eyre across cultures and media
