Sophie Alexander

An Excess of Belonging in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me

Supervisors: Dr Anna Johnston; Prof. Ralph Crane

Discipline: English

I am currently studying a Master of Arts and conducting a postcolonial analysis of a novel called Anita and Me (1996), which was written by the British-Indian writer Meera Syal. Theories of migrancy, diaspora and national identity are especially relevant for this analysis.

I am examining Anita and Me as a Black British bildungsroman, a genre of literature which has been neglected and is only just beginning to be critically theorised. I am particularly interested in the interrelationship between history and memory, and how the experience of traumatic events is transferred between generations. I am also concerned about the broader cultural work of the novel in the public sphere, and how it might simultaneously represent a change in attitudes as well as actively changing these attitudes.

Margit Assmann

Authority and Obedience in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Homecoming

Supervisors: Dr Eva Meidl, Dr Billy Badger

Discipline: German

I am undertaking a Master of Arts degree examining the issues of authority and obedience as represented in Bernhard Schlink’s novels Der Vorleser and Die Heimkehr.

I completed my Bachelor of Arts with Honours in 2007. In my dissertation I examined the poetic work of Walther von der Vogelweide (a minstrel and political ‘Sangspruchdichter’) who lived in the turbulent times between 1170-1230. During this period, Walther saw emperors come and go, witnessing the conflicts between the ‘Hohenstaufen’ and the ‘Welfen,’ which were influenced by Rome and the pope. Walther managed, it appears, to write political songs for more than one political wing at the same time, while all the while keeping an eye on his own personal interests.

Returning to the 21st century for my master’s dissertation, I decided to look at a catastrophe that has occupied the minds of people around the world for more than 60 years. Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser, is a story that looks at the relationship between the perpetrator generation of WWII and the next generation, and has not only earned the author success on the international literary arena, but has also attracted the close attention of literary critics. Schlink’s later novel Die Heimkehr has not quite matched Der Vorleser’s attention. In this novel, a young man endeavors to get hold of the ending of a fragmented homecoming story. He tries to locate the author of the story, who turns out to be his father whom he believed to have died in WWII. Die Heimkehr as well as Der Vorleser portray the ‘human dilemma’ of obedience and thus resembling important aspects of Stanley Milgram’s study series of obedience to authority. As the issues of ‘authority’ and ‘obedience’ are central to an understanding of both novels, the focus of my research centers on these important psychological and political aspects.

Sophia Staite

Supervisors: Dr Craig Norris, Dr Barbara Hartley

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".

Lesley Beasley

Supervisors: Dr Nicola Goc; Prof Ralph Crane

Discipline: English

I am researching the life and times of Maxwell Miller, publisher and editor of the 1850s Tasmanian Daily News, radical politician, self- styled "Champion of the Working Classes", and a satirical poet who once published a book of verse lampooning (some said slandering) almost every member of the Tasmanian parliament. My interest is in both his poetry and his journalism, and in particular, his political satire. Miller's editorial prose was typical of the vitriolic 'pre- professional' era of journalism. I plan to use the 1856 Hobart election to show how this exaggerated satirical style, including constant antagonism between rival papers, created what might be termed a theatre of the press — a political burlesque with something akin to pantomime or a penny dreadful — that kept people turning the pages and buying the next issue.

Rebecca Dorgelo

Supervisors: Dr 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.

Anne P Fagan

Wolf Child Feral Text: Writing the Human-Animal

Supervisors:  Prof Helen Tiffin and Dr Elizabeth Leane

Discipline:  English

My MA thesis circles around the possibility of writing the human-animal, or what could be called the un-languaged regions of humanity – specifically using literature and stories of “wild”, “wolf”, or “feral” children as a pressure point in the human/animal divide.  The purpose and direction of this research is to question what are the possibilities and potentialities of using language and different forms of literature to access the mind and world of the feral human. To what effect do the different literary forms and techniques, the patterns and sounds capture these inaccessible minds? Or is it the case that these texts work as an exercise in empathy, through the expansion of the imaginative faculties that Humanity is so proud of but rarely exercise to their full capacity?

I chose my field of research as a way to combine two of my intellectual passions: literature and animal ethics. I believe the same act of empathy or imaginative projection that propels us towards the enigma of the wild child should encourage us to extend further and deconstruct some of the definitive boundaries between and within species. That is, to imagine the lives of non-human animals and to imagine differently the assumed Humanity of humankind in order to perceive the Hum-Animal.

Lyn McGaurr

Travel Journalists: Nomads or Emissaries?

Supervisor: Dr 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?

Jane McGennisken

Reading encoded and encoding themes of national growth in Australian School Readers

Supervisors: Dr Philip Mead; Dr Jenna Mead

Discipline: English

After a brief but illustrious career as a newspaper journalist in rural Victoria (covering stories about mouse plagues, the farming of water chestnuts and the endless rounds of debutante balls), I moved to the bright city lights to embark upon a university education.

At the University of Melbourne, I dabbled in all things creative during a Bachelor of Creative Arts, completing Honours in Creative Writing in 2002. After relocating to Tasmania the following year, I joined the UTAS community, finishing a Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary English/SOSE) in 2004. The same year, I commenced my postgraduate research.

The working title of my project is ‘Reading encoded and encoding themes of national growth in Australian School Readers'. It is concerned with first edition School Readers produced by state education departments around Australia in the early part of the twentieth century. The study posits School Readers as educational technologies integral to the narration of Australia as an imagined community and seeks to problematise the construction of this metanarrative.

As well as working on my thesis, I have had the opportunity to work at UTAS as an English tutor and research assistant. I am currently a postgraduate representative on the board of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) as well as being a board member of the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR).

Damian McIver

Supervisors: Dr Jason Bainbridge and Dr Libby Lester

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

My initial foray into the world of postgraduate study involved a lengthy period analysing that beloved Australian current affairs program - Today Tonight. Contrary to most people's expectations, including my own, I actually quite enjoyed it and the completion of my honours thesis (Representing Australianness: Our National Identity brought to you by Today Tonight) encouraged me to continue my studies.

My PhD thesis is tentatively titled "Profiling the Political Documentary" and is motivated by a desire to understand why political documentaries (such as An Inconvenient Truth, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me) have become so popular and what this popularity can tell us about the relationship between the media and politics today.

Stephanie Pfennigwerth

“Of Emus and Empires: (Re)discovering an Extinct Tasmanian Species”

Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Leane, Professor Helen Tiffin

Discipline: English

In 1804 a curious cargo arrived in France: dwarf emus from King Island, Tasmania. Collected on the expedition of Nicolas Baudin, they were evidence of a territory captured, classified and perhaps — intellectually if not politically — controlled by Napoleon. The emus were presented to Josephine and outlived the Empress and all others of their kind. But tragedy combines with irony, for birds collected in an Enlightened quest for knowledge and order have for two centuries been confused with other species, and their remains are scattered across Europe. In Tasmania, where the thylacine is famously extinct, the emu is almost completely unknown.

The King Island emu is not only a bird but also an artefact; a nexus of natural and cultural history symbolising the public intentions and private uncertainties of a particular human society. Tracing the emu’s story, my MA thesis will highlight some of the contradictions in the encounter and perception of animals in this society: reason/emotion; preservation/destruction; discovery/extinction. Examining the role, function and influence of animals on the Baudin expedition, it aims to challenge common assumptions about human dominion over other species. It will also contribute to the rediscovery of a forgotten natural history and heritage, of emus and humans alike.

Stephanie Pfennigwerth has Honours degrees in Communications and Antarctic Studies. She has worked as a researcher, writer and editor for more than a decade, feeding her fascination for animals with trips to the Arctic, the Antarctic, and places in between. After a stint at the Australian Antarctic Division she swapped the ice for the outback, working in the Shark Bay World Heritage Area, Western Australia. She recently met the remains of Baudin’s emus in Paris.

Toni Sherwood

“Annie Baxter in Van Diemen's Land: An edited and annotated version of her Journal, 1834-1851”

Supervisors: Prof Ralph Crane and Dr Anna Johnston

Discipline: English

This thesis will produce an abridged critical edition of those sections of Annie Baxter's extant journal written during Baxter's five visits to Van Diemen's Land between 1834 and 1851. Small sections of the journal for this period have appeared in Lucy Frost's A Face in the Glass: The Journal and Life of Annie Baxter Dawbin published in 1992, but the bulk of it is not readily accessible. The extant journal comprises 32 volumes and 845,000 words and is currently held in the Dixon Manuscript Collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. My project aims to produce an appropriately introduced reading text of approximately 75,000 words from the 170,000 or so which record Baxter's experience in Van Diemen's Land.

The journal is a significant colonial artefact which at once provides a detailed record of Baxter's life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four and chronicles aspects of military, social and cultural life in Van Diemen's Land. The pages of Baxter's journal not only offer valuable insights into the experience of being a young woman in Van Diemen Land, but also afford glimpses of many other lives – official, vice-regal, military, settler, medical, juvenile, servant, convict and medical. Editing this journal produces a text which has the potential to increase understanding of the colonial past for contemporary readers.

I returned to full time study at UTAS in 2001 after undertaking my undergraduate degree at Murdoch University in WA. After completing my Honours degree in 2001 I enrolled in a Masters degree in the School of English, Journalism and European Languages. This thesis titled: “Reappraising Forgotten Fictions: The Tasmanian Romances of Marie Bjelke Petersen" was successfully examined in 2004. In August 2005 with the encouragement and support of several members of the academic staff I began my current project.