Christine Angel

BTourism, BA (Hons)
The "New Woman" in Australian Theatre

Supervisors: Dr Rose Gaby; Dr Robert Clarke

Discipline: English

Title: The Odd Women: The “New Woman,” Ibsen, and the Australian Theatre, 1889-1914.

A spur-of-the-moment-decision in late 2002 led to a degree in Tourism in 2007, a degree in Arts with First Class Honours in 2009, and now to the prospect of a PhD in (hopefully) 2013 - and to achieving the “floppy hat” that I first saw and coveted in 2003. After a hiccup, my research topic changed from The “New Woman Novel” in Australia, in January this year, to The “New Woman” in Australian Theatre, in August. This was an interesting change of direction –same era, same “new woman,” different focus.

Several major phenomena were part of everyday discussion in the period from 1889 to 1914: women’s issues; political recognition of women’s issues; and drama about women’s issues. One group whose personal and professional lives were intimately connected to all three were the women who presented those issues in dramatic form: the actresses. They were “new women,” working, in dramas addressing “the Woman Question,” at a time when the Australian theatre was coalescing into a national industry, with increasingly diverse repertoires. The country was reaching nationhood, and women achieved the right to vote. Actresses were contributing to the history of the theatre in Australia, but by doing so they were helping to further women’s rights: as women; as actresses; and as presenters of social issues which were of importance to women, and to Australian society in general. I suggest that close examination of letters, critiques, and reviews published in contemporary local newspapers and magazines will reveal, through their reaction to the issues as re/presented in drama, how the new ways of thinking about the Woman Question were perceived by the Australian public. The study confines itself to three foci of response: three plays by Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and Rosmersholm; the actresses as new women; and the dramatis personae that embodied the stereo/typical attributes of the new woman.

Launz Burch

Rebecca Dorgelo

Travelling into History- Britain and India in William Dalrymple's Popular History and Travel Writing

Supervisors: Assoc Prof Anna Johnston; Prof Ralph Crane.

Discipline: English

My PhD is concerned with the travel and narrative history writing of Wiliam Dalrymple about India. Dalrymple has written numerous travel texts: In Xanadu: A Quest(1990), City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1993), From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzanitum (1997), The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters (1998), and the narrative history works: White Mughals: Love & Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (2002) and The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (2006). I am particularly interested in the ways in which Dalrymple's texts engage with the history (and continuing effects) of the British Raj, and the position that the works take in current debates about imperial history.

Zach Eaves

Tradition, Mythology and the Popular and Political Success of the Austrian Right

Supervisors: Dr Billy Badger; Dr Eva Meidl

Discipline: German

Zach’s thesis will explore the multifaceted characteristics of German Volkskultur and their application in serving the ambitions of right-wing groups in Austria. It will investigate man’s relationship toward nature, and the culture that derives from such a relationship, such as mythology and tradition, as factors that contribute to the success of right-wing politicians and the growing ranks of supporters. In his thesis Zach will explore the way mythology and tradition help to produce and cultivate virtues, which form the foundation of a culture and identity politically articulated by the right-wing movement in Austria. In particular, he will be using the example of political parties such as the BZÖ and FPÖ to explore the reasons for their monumental success and popularity. 

Sophie Fern

Mediated Encounters with Antarctic Animals: Are We Constructing a Dream or Revealing a Reality?

Supervisors: Dr Kate Nash; Dr Elizabeth Leane

Discipline: English

Britta Hartmann

BA (Hons)
Colonial Island Narratives and Their Aftermath

Supervisors: Dr Lisa Fletcher; Prof Ralph Crane

Discipline: English

Islands, both real and imagined, have long enchanted the Western world, so much so that there now exists a field of study known as “island studies.” We have been telling the story of the island for centuries, reaching at least as far back as Homer’s The Odyssey, and we continue to tell it today.

My PhD focuses on island representations within island narratives. My topic arose partly from my Honours thesis, Desiring Myth, Denying Reality: The Bounty Narrative and the Continental Construction of Pitcairn Island as “Paradise,” which examined novels, films and travel narratives of the Bounty/Pitcairn Island story. Islands remain central to my PhD, but my focus is now on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its successors, which include Johann D. Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Frederick Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841), R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967), J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), and the many filmic adaptations of Treasure Island.

Claire Konkes

The Age of Consent: Media, public discourse frameworks and the last taboo

Supervisors: Assoc Prof Libby Lester; Dr Nicola Goc

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

In 2009, a 12-year-old Tasmanian girl was forced into prostitution by her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. Both were jailed for the crime. More than 100 men allegedly paid to have sex with the girl, were interviewed by police but, The Mercury revealed in September 2010, were not charged. The resulting community furore over the perceived leniency towards these alleged child sex offenders dominated news headlines for weeks.
This very public debate, between the broader community’s demand for justice and the government and judiciary’s insistence there was no case against the men, was contested in media. It provides an ideal case study for an investigation into how contemporary media frame public discourse and how media negotiate questions of ethics and morality within criticisms of moral panic and sensationalism.  It also illustrates media roles in representing socio-economic disadvantage and the vulnerability of children to sexual predication (historically linked to age of consent laws), as well as emerging questions regarding pedophilia and child pornography in both new and old media.  
My thesis asks how mediated public discourses around the issue of sexuality and children, particularly within legal and ethical frameworks relating to the notion of an age of consent, are changing in relation to new media technologies, platforms and practices.

Anna Lucas

John Martinkus

Reporting the Third Afghan War: The US and NATO's War in Afghanistan 2001-2009

Supervisors: Prof Ralph Crane; Assoc Prof Libby Lester

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

Lyn McGaurr

Travel Journalism: A Cosmopolitan Perspective

Supervisor: Prof Ralph Crane; Assoc Prof Libby Lester

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

Much travel journalism in newspapers strives to enchant, but scratch the surface and you may discover a contested site where governments, corporations, small businesses and interest groups vie for access and publicity. This is a genre in which individual journalists traverse territory spanning both globalism and cosmopolitanism. Are they nomads or emissaries? What can their odysseys reveal about the effects of the neoliberal imperatives of global trade and economic growth on increasingly individualised journalists? Can cosmopolitanism promote a self-reflexivity among travel journalists that counterbalances advantages enjoyed by elite sources? Can travel journalism contribute to global citizenship even when it reports only the celebratory and noncontroversial? Does it promote openness to distant peoples, environments and events or merely nurture compliant consumers? How is local identity produced and reflected on what Szerszynski and Toogood describe as the "cosmopolitan public stage", and how do struggles between sources affect those representations and flows?

Adam Ouston

'Home' and 'Performance' in the Travel Writing of Robert Dessaix

Supervisors: Dr Robert Clarke; Dr Lisa Fletcher

Discipline: English

Fiona Reynolds

‘No Longer Anonymous: Surviving Trauma in the Media Spotlight’.

Supervisors: Dr Nicola Goc and Prof Ralph Crane

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

This study investigates the impact of journalistic practices and subsequent news coverage on high profile trauma survivors.
It will ask what lessons news personnel can learn from people who experienced trauma and whether the survivors’ attitudes towards the media changed as they made the transition from private to public citizen.

Alessandro Sheedy

Sophia Staite

The Gothic Lolita Bible: Manufacturing Identity (Sub)Cultural identity play, fan labour and media practice in gothic lolita communities

Supervisors: Dr Barbara Hartley; Dr Michelle Phillipov; Assoc Prof Libby Lester

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

In 2003 I completed an Honours degree in International Relations comparing the regulation of history textbook representations of war in Japan, Germany and the USA.  During my research I became fascinated by all things Japanese and subsequently completed a BA in Japanese language, including a year of study in Japan. In mid-2008 I submitted my second Honours thesis, "Behind Anime Lines", which critically examines claims that the international popularity of Japanese animation is a source of 'soft' international power for Japan. I am currently researching intercultural play and occidentalism/orientalism surrounding international gothic and lolita subcultures and the Japanese magazine "Gothic Lolita Bible".