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

Obedience in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader

Supervisors: Dr Eva Meidl, Dr Billy Badger

Discipline: German

I am undertaking a Master of Arts degree examining the issue of obedience as represented in Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser.

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 some 60 years. Bernhard Schlink’s novel Der Vorleser, a story that looks at the relationship between the perpetrator generation of WWII and the next generation, has not only earned the author success on the international literary arena, but has also attracted the close attention of critics. As the issue of ‘obedience’ is central to an understanding of the novel, I am centering my research on this important psychological and political aspect.

Sophia Barratt-Peacock

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.

Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

The question of historical truth in fiction, with a focus on Kate Grenville's re-writing of colonial contact in The Secret River.
MA, commenced February 2007

Supervisors: Dr Anna Johnston; Prof Ralph Crane

Discipline: English

I completed my Honours year in 2006 under the Cultural Environments and Heritage Scholarship Scheme at UTas. My institutional partner was the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and my Honours project was a Creative Writing submission (comprising a work of fiction and an accompanying scholarly exegesis).

My research during my Honours year led me into the contested territory of “historical truth.” I developed a continuing (and only slightly unhealthy) obsession with questions of “truth” and “fiction,” and decided to pursue an investigation of these issues, this time at a Masters level, and through a traditional research thesis.

I am looking particularly at Kate Grenville's recent novel, The Secret River , and its controversial reception, exploring the criticism it has received from historians. At the same time, it has secured multiple literary awards and nominations, and I am interested in examining the puzzling phenomenon of “prizeness” in the context of critical and commercial appraisal of contemporary Australian fiction.

Michael Christie

The representation of citizenship in the Australian novel since 1984: the post-colonial imagination in a time of public sphere refiguration.

Supervisors: Dr Philip Mead; Dr Anna Johnston
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Discipline: English.

My research is centred on interpreting selected Australian novels that were published in, or respond to, the long Labor decade (the period of the federal Labor Party government: 1983-1996). I am interested in the concepts surrounding citizenship and how to read these discourses and practices of participation, status and belonging through recent fiction (especially ‘grunge' and ‘post-grunge' fiction) against the backdrop of a transforming Australian Labourism.

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.

Rosie Dub

Story: Mapping the Journey to Self

Supervisors: Dr Jason Bainbridge; Prof Ralph Crane

Discipline: Journalism, Media and Communications

For most of my adult life I have been closely linked to story telling: as an undergraduate (BA Communications at University of Technology, Sydney); a postgraduate student (MA Creative Writing, Sheffield Hallam University, UK); a writer; editor; and a teacher of writing. For the past fifteen years I have been assessing, editing, judging and mentoring both fiction and non fiction manuscripts. For more than six years I have been designing and teaching courses and workshops in creative writing, editing and more recently, myths and symbols. And for as long as I can remember, I have been writing stories. My short fiction and travel writings have been widely published and my first novel, Gathering Storm, will be published by Penguin in March 2008. All this time I have been developing my own ideas about the transformative nature of story. What stories give us. What makes them important in our lives. My thesis: Story: Mapping the Journey to Self, explores the structure of stories and storytelling as metaphors for the inner journeys we make.

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.

Dominic Lennard

The representation of children in science fiction and horror.

Supervisors: Dr Elle Leane; Dr Lisa Fletcher.

Discipline: English.

Dominic Lennard is a full-time PhD student in the Department of English, Journalism and European Languages at UTAS.  Dominic commenced his studies at UTAS in 2002, becoming a member of the Golden Key International Honor Society in his first year, before being included in the Dean’s Roll of Excellence for the second and third years of his degree.  In his third year he was also awarded the F.G.N. Ewence Memorial Prize for English and the Cecil Rainer Murray History Prize for European History.  His Honours thesis, completed in 2005, was entitled “Men are From Mars: Gender and Representation in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard.”

In 2005 Dominic was awarded a scholarship to continue his studies under the research higher degrees program at UTAS, and did so in the area of popular film.  His current research interests include genre film—particularly horror films and westerns— the representation of children in film, and theoretical approaches to popular children's culture.  His PhD thesis is entitled “Little Terrors: The Child Antagonist in the Horror Film” and is being composed under the excellent supervision of Dr. Lisa Fletcher and Dr. Elizabeth Leane.

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.

Bruce Montgomery

Master's thesis: "Hold the Presses: the 2020 Vision for Australian Newspapers"

Supervisors: Prof Ralph Crane, Dr Libby Lester, Prof. Lucy Frost, Verica Rupar

Discipline: Journalism

How can the newspaper survive in 2020 as an economically-viable entity given the competition it faces from new digital media? The new media have relatively small fixed costs and few variable costs compared with newspapers. There is also a general expectation that, aside from connection costs, the product will be delivered free. The orthodox media industry response has been to embrace the new media in a bid to maintain market share and viability, but how do they derive new revenue?

Thesis commenced February 2007.

Eleni Pavlides

Multiculturalism Today: Texts, Contexts and Writing Practice

Supervisors: Dr Philip Mead; Dr Jenna Mead

Discipline: English

During my twenties I enjoyed a career in corporate training and development. In my thirties, after pursuing other options such as working as Development Manager for the Festival Perth and then in Catholic Healthcare Management, I decided to pursue my dream of working in the performing arts. I was accepted into Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAPA) and after study, began my second career working in Community theatre as a writer/director/actor/producer and general dogsbody. My involvement with community theatre continued when I relocated to Hobart but given that I wanted to develop my writing I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). Much to my surprise, academia soon became my primary concern, overtaking my theatrical interests. I loved the study of French and English Literature and my writing (at least in my estimation) was steadily improving. I completed my Honours year in English in 2004 and having well and truly caught the academic bug, I enrolled in my Masters in 2006. My research looks at multiculturalism in Australia today and its impact on Australian multicultural writing.

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.