ANZAMEMS 2-6 December 2008

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Inc.), 7th Biennial International Conference will be convened at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

This year the conference has an open theme. Twenty-minute papers on all aspects of medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies (all broadly defined) are most welcome. Panel proposals of 3 papers are also welcome.

The conference will host papers on literature, history, religious studies, art history, music, philosophy, medievalism, etc from academics, independent scholars, graduate students, early career researchers, all of whom are warmly invited. Two abstracts for musical pieces have already been accepted.

Keynote speakers are Mary Carruthers (NYU), Conal Condren (University of NSW), Ruth Evans (University of Stirling), Edward James (University College Dublin), and Rodney Thomson (University of Tasmania).

For more details visit the conference website: http://www.anzamems2008.utas.edu.au/

Conference convenors are Elizabeth Freeman, History and Classics Elizabeth.Freeman@utas.edu.au and Jenna Mead, English, Journalism and European Languages Jenna.Mead@utas.edu.au.

Please send conference enquiries and abstracts to either of the convenors, or to anzamems2008@utas.edu.au

For more details on the ANZAMEMS association, please see http://www.anzamems.arts.uwa.edu.au/

Symposium: Time and Temporalities

University of Tasmania: 17-18 December 2007.

Featuring Carolyn Dinshaw, Professor, Social & Cultural Analysis, English, New York University.

Click here for the program.

Click here for the titles and abstracts.

Click here for registration form.

For more information, please contact Dr Jenna Mead: Jenna.Mead@utas.edu.au

JMC Student Wins National Recognition

JMC student Jeff Donne has been selected as a runner-up/finalist in the 2007 JUST SUPER Student Journalist of the Year Award 2007.

More than 90 entries were received this year in the national competition which is run by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and the Walkley Foundation for Journalism.

Jeff’s radio documentary examined the LaRouche Youth Movement (a group founded by global warming sceptic and US presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche) and it’s recruitment drive through Australian universities.

This year the award was judged by a panel of senior journalists: Walkley Award-Winning ABC Journalist, Steve Cannane, The Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion page editor, Lisa Pryor, and The Daily Telegraph’s police reporter Rhett Watson.

They described Jeff’s documentary as original.

"It drew on the journalist’s own experience. He came across information, took it further and researched it.”

“Right from the start, it was interesting. It was entertaining as well as having good information in it. It was also in the public interest.”

MEAA Federal Secretary, Christopher Warren said the award encouraged “young journalists to strive for excellence from an early stage".

“It is heartening for our industry to see responsible and creative journalism being encouraged in our universities, and both students and lecturers are owed praise for the calibre of entries,” he said.

28 September 2007

Photo: Jeff Donne

Media Lab Hosts Live ABC Radio Broadcast

The Journalism, Media and Communication Program's new Media Lab played host to ABC Radio recently, for the launch of Heywire 2007.

Presenter Cameron Wilson and Producer Sally Deakis broadcast the Tasmanian Country Hour live from a corner of the new lab in Hobart , sending the program back to ABC studios via a telephone line to listeners around the state.

Heywire is a national competition aimed at promoting the voices and stories of regional youth, who can share their thoughts in words, pictures or sound. Winners get an all expenses paid trip to Canberra for a week to participate in the Heywire Youth Issues Forum. Their stories are produced and broadcast via ABC Radio and the web to all parts of Australia and overseas.

This year's launch in the new Media Lab featured live interviews with two JMC students, Carly Dolan of Kimberley near Deloraine, who spoke about health issues in regional areas, and Catherine Norton of Strahan who spoke about using a university assessment to make a radio documentary about issues relating to rural students and distance education.

JMC Lecturer Dr Craig Norris also featured in the broadcast to explain how new media could expand the reach of Heywire and tap into different stories about Tasmanian Life.

To find out more information about Heywire go to: www.abc.net.au/heywire

Photos:
Top (from left to right): Cameron Wilson (ABC), Catherine Norton (JMC student), Carly Dolan (JMC student).
Bottom: (from left to right) Ryan Davey (JMC student), Jonathan Gul (JMC student).

Danielle Wood named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists of the Year.

At the recent Sydney Writers Festival, the School of English, Journalism and European Language's creative writing lecturer Danielle Wood was named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Novelists of the Year on the strength of her second book Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls. She also won the award in 2004 for her debut novel The Alphabet of Light and Dark. Other winners of the award include MJ Hyland, Elliot Perlman, Sonya Harnett and Chloe Hooper.

JMC Media Lab Launch

16 May 2007

The Journalism, Media and Communications Media Lab was launched by the Hon David Bartlett MHA, Minister for Education and Vice Chancellor Professor Daryl Le Grew on 16 May 2007.

The new $500,000 Media Lab will include five radio and video production studios, a 20-space editing suite and a newsroom.

Students will use the lab to produce journalism and media in a variety of forms across a range of platforms, both experimentally for assessment and for publication and broadcast.

Professor Jan Pakulski, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, highlighted the role of professionally trained journalists and communication experts in fostering better public understanding of complex issues facing our society.

‘These include environmental challenges, ethical dilemmas and problems of social integration brought by rapid globalization,' Prof Pakulski said. ‘Raising the standards of professional communication is essential for dealing successfully with all those challenges.'

Journalism, Media and Communications Coordinator, Dr Libby Lester, said that the new lab's design recognised the dramatic shift that had occurred in the media in recent years.

‘We want students to embrace the new technologies now available – from mobile phones to MP3s to high-end cameras, field recorders and editing software – to produce exciting but also important journalism and media,' she said.

‘Students will leave us with the skills to work in traditional mainstream media but also with the ability to go out into the world independently and tell stories that have the potential to make a real difference.'

Photos:
Top: the Hon David Bartlett MHA
Middle (from left to right): Dr Libby Lester, Prof Ralph Crane, Prof Daryl Le Grew, the Hon David Bartlett MHA and Prof Jan Pakulski.
Bottom: Dr Libby Lester being interviewed in the television studio.

New JMC media lab

Completion date - Semester 1, 2007
Click here to view plans:    Page 1    Page 2    Page 3

Sense of real journalism

Education Minister David Bartlett holds his annual mock media
conference for first year students in the Journalism, Media and
Communications Program. The conference is organized as a part of
assessment.

30 April 2007

"Imagining Antarctica"

Christchurch, New Zealand: 4 - 6 September, 2008

Gateway Antarctica and the English programme at the Univeristy of Canterbury, together with the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania, will host a conference examining Antarctica from a cultural perspective. Drawing on the arts, social sciences and humanities, the conference will focus attention on the ways in which we perceive and represent the southernmost continent. This will be followed by a second conference in Hobart, Tasmania, in 2010. Click here for more information.

"Animals and Society II: Considering Animals"

Hobart: 3 - 6 July, 2007

Following on the success of the inaugural Animals and Society Conference held at the University of Western Australia in 2005, the Animals and Society Study Group (Australia) and the University of Tasmania are pleased to be hosting "Animals and Society II: Considering Animals". Click here for more information.

International Symposium
Form and Style in Journalism: Newspapers and the Representation of News 1880-2006

14-15 December 2006

This symposium is the second gathering of international scholars interested in exploring the question of journalism development and its relationship to social change. The first symposium on Form and Style in Journalism took place last year in Groningen, The Netherlands. It was organized by the Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities, and the Journalism Department of the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). The participants agreed to continue the work and to extend discussion from European newspapers - the focus of Groningen meeting - to non-European newspapers. The Hobart symposium continues this dialogue and explores the question of journalism and social change in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific region.

Please click here for the program.

Posted: December 2006

Appalachian Spring

Dr CA Cranston recently returned from long service leave, during which she was invited speaker at Appalachian State University, North Carolina. She delivered a public lecture titled I'd rather be Hiking: Footnotes and Footwear, which was followed by a reception. Sponsored by Sustainable Development (in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies) and by Women's Studies, the lecture discussed the intersection of text and constructions of geographic context in the work of Tasmanian writers, island literature, and Dante's The Divine Comedy.

She also conducted a graduate seminar on "Wom(a)n and Sustainability" which challenged the critical positions of deep ecology and ecofeminism(s) in relation to praxis.

This was followed by a conference trip to the Alps-Adriatic University, Austria (the site of her 2004 teaching-exchange) to give a paper on representations of water conservation in literature, titled Wet, in the Mindscape of the Dry and delivered at the European Association for the Study of Culture, Literature, and the Environment.

Posted: September 2006

Empire Calling
Administering Colonial Spaces

Osmania University, Hyderabad, India
16 - 18 January 2007

This interdisciplinary conference is jointly convened by the University of Tasmania's Centre for Colonialism and Its Aftermath; the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania; and the Department of English, Osmania University, Hyderabad.

The conference organisers invite papers which explore the roles of the men and women who administered the British Empire, particularly India. "Administering" involves many forms of activity-managing and organising; financing and accounting; monitoring and measuring; ordering and supplying; writing and implementing policy-across diverse domains of practice (the Civil Service, schools and universities, missions, domestic realms, justice systems, etc). Administrative arrangements involve complex cross-cultural relationships in colonial spaces, often through radically unequal and racially based power relations. Colonial administrations call into being the spaces under their control, and they do so through the accumulation and management of information and knowledge.

http://www.utas.edu.au/ejel/empirecalling/

AustLit: the Resource for Australian Literature

At the beginning of 2006 Philip Mead joined the AustLit Consortium, based at the University of Queensland, as its Tasmanian member. As well as the University of Tasmania, the AustLit Consortium includes ten other Australian universities, the Australian Research Council and the National Library of Australia (see info-austlit@austlit.edu.au). Philip is one of the Chief Investigators on the successful ARC Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Grant project, AustLit: the Resource for Australian Literature. AustLit (www.austlit.edu.au) is the premier resource discovery service for authoritative information on Australian Literature. The continuously updated database contains hundreds of thousands of records relating to creative and critical works by more than 78,000 authors and literary organisations from the late 18th century to the present. Philip heads a research team that includes current and recent postgraduates in English. The major focus of this research is to compile a dataset for the literature of Tasmania, as a subset of the AustLit database, and to write a descriptive monograph to accompany the dataset.

German – A success story

A good time was enjoyed by all at the annual German Prize Giving Ceremony on Thursday, 30 March. Prof Jan Pakulski, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, congratulated the students for their outstanding achievement in German. He stressed the importance of language learning in an increasingly competitive environment. Students with language skills have the world at their feet, for they can take up scholarships in foreign countries. In addition, language skills studied in combination with another major gives future job seekers the edge over other applicants. Prof Pakulski said he was particularly pleased with the success of German on the University's Launceston Campus. Prof Otlowski, Honorary Consul for Switzerland, stressed the common roots of European literature and the value of literature studies. Dr Meidl, Honorary Consul for Austria, expressed her delight with the successful exchange program with the University of Klagenfurt.

Pictured: Prof Jan Pakulski, Elizabeth Jedamzik, Ivana Mujic (front), Lieselotte Fearman, Margit Assmann, Doris Marcuk (front), Nicholas Luckman, Dr Billy Badger, Prof Margaret Otlowski, Dr Eva Meidl. Prizes were awarded to Meredith Geeves and Ruth Jones in absentia.

Scholarship Success

The School is pleased to congratulate Rebecca Dorgelo, Dominic Lennard, Elizabeth Mead, Eleni Pavlides, and Ruth Thomas on being awarded scholarships to support their research higher degree programs. All five candidates completed their undergraduate and first-class Honours degrees at UTAS.

• Rebecca Dorgelo was admitted to the Dean's Roll of Excellence in 2002.
• Dominic Lennard was admitted to the Dean's Roll of Excellence in 2003 and was awarded the Cecil Rainer Murray History Prize for Modern European History and the FGN Ewence Memorial Prize (English) in 2004.
• Elizabeth Mead was admitted to the Dean's Roll of Excellence in 2004 and was awarded the Bean Essay Prize (English) and the James McAuley Memory Prize (English) in 2004.
• Eleni Pavlides was admitted to the Dean's Roll of Excellence in 2002.
• Ruth Thomas was awarded the Malcolm McRae Prize (English and History) in 1999, the Alfred Houston Intermediate Prize (Philosophy) in 2000 and the A. B. Taylor Prize (English) in 2001. She was admitted to the Dean's Roll of Excellence in 2001 and was awarded a University Medal in 2002. Other recipients of University Medals in English include Elinor Heard (2003), Sean Elwell-Sutton (1997), Pei Ping chia (1996) and Michelle Harris (1990).

For more information about scholarships please click here.

Pictured (from top and left to right): Rebecca Dorgelo, Dominic Lennard and Elizabeth Mead.

Congratulations to Teaching Merit Certificate recipients Dr Jason Bainbridge and Dr Bert Peeters

The Teaching Merit Certificate scheme, like the Teaching Excellence Award scheme, recognises teaching members of academic staff who are judged by peers and students as being highly proficient and competent teachers. Jason and Bert received the certificates for their work in the Journalism, Media and Communications and French disciplines respectively.

For more information about Teaching Merit Certificates please click here.

Pictured (from left): Dr Bert Peeters and Dr Jason Bainbridge.

Congratulations on recently awarded PhD theses

The following candidates' PhD theses were successfully examined and awarded in 2005:

• Dr Deane Blackler (Professor Lucy Frost) 'The Adventurous Travels of a Disobedient Reader: A Reading Practice for the Fiction of W. G. Sebald'
• Dr Yvette Blackwood (Dr Elle Leane) 'The Hotel in Postmodern Literature and Film'
• Dr Jesse Shipway (Dr Philip Mead) 'Scars on the Archive, Visions of Place: Genocide and Modernity in Tasmania'
• Dr Ralph Spaulding (Dr Philip Mead) 'Poetry and Tasmanian Educational Institutions 1840-1950'
• Dr Nicole Anae (Dr Rose Gaby) ''"A Crowned and Selected Band of Women:" Tasmanian Actresses and Celebrities of the Nineteenth Century"'

Visit by the inaugural UTAS Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 the School of English, Journalism and European Languages hosted an informal morning tea for the Nobel Prize-winning author, J.M. Coetzee and his partner, Professor Dorothy Driver. Academic and administrative staff from the School enjoyed the opportunity to talk to both John and Dorothy, who is well known for her work on South African literature.

Pictured: J.M. Coetzee with Elizabeth Mead, a Research Assistant in SEJEL.

Dr Lisa Fletcher awarded 2005 Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching

Lisa was commended by the Vice-Chancellor as "an extraordinary role model for other commencing academics who aspire to excellence in their profession." Lisa teaches in the English program, and has particular interests in the fields of historical fiction and film adaptations. She is the current coordinator of the 1st year English program at UTAS.

Pictured: Dr Lisa Fletcher.