Honorary Research Professor - Emeritus Professor
MA Roch., PhD Roch., Prof. English
| Contact Campus | Sandy Bay Campus |
| Building | Humanities Building |
| Room Reference | c/- 557 |
| Telephone | +61 3 6226 2100 |
| Fax | +61 3 6226 7631 |
| L.Frost@utas.edu.au |
Lucy was appointed as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Tasmania in 2009. She has particular interests in how the past is 'read', and in how those readings are translated into what is called 'cultural heritage'. At present she is asking how one 'reads' the experiences of female convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land, and how one turns those readings into the products of cultural heritage tourism. She has held an ARC Discovery Grant to look at female convicts as women travellers; is a member of the Board of the Female Factory Historic Site (Cascades); co-convenor of the Female Factory Research Group; and a member of the Board of the Tasman Institute for Conservation and Convict Studies. In 2005 with the support provided by a grant from the Sustainable Tourism CRC she created the first site-specific guide to the Female Factory, Footsteps and Voices, which was launched in November at the Female Factory Muster, of which she was co-convenor.
Lucy has designed and taught a wide range of units in the fields of American, Australian, and Women's Studies. She is currently teaching an honours unit, 'Endangered Bodies in Colonial Space', and is supervising postgraduate students whose topics include: narratives of the dingo in Australia; editing an unpublished journal kept by a woman who was also an artist in 19 th century Hobart; 'reading' the New England houses of three nineteenth-century American writers (Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain); the daughter of marriageable age in narratives of incest during the long 18 th century; reading the fiction of W. G. Sebald; the role of the medical expert in media coverage of trials for infanticide; and reading Steve and Blue: the fraught relationship between Eve Langley and her sister.
Lucy's research interests are currently located at the nexus where pure basic research intersects with applied research. Much of her work is inter-disciplinary, and some involves industry partners. Her most recent projects and the grants that support them are:
In February 1999 Lucy convened an international interdisciplinary conference, 'The Colonial Eye', supported with funds from her Chair Establishment Grant.
Out of that conference came the International Centre for Convict Studies, bringing together scholars across a range of disciplines from the Universities of Barcelona, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Tasmania. That Centre subsequently sponsored conferences at Leicester (1999), Tasmania (2003), and Barcelona (2004). In July 2005 it is sponsoring 'Landscapes, Exiles, Belonging, Home', a symposium to be held at the New Norcia Monastery and hosted by the University of Western Australia.
In 2000, Lucy and Professor Michael Bennett (History and Classics) convened a group which included academics and postgraduate students who had participated in 'The Colonial Eye', and proposed the development of on-going collaborative ties through the structure of a research cluster. After much debate, it was decided to call the cluster 'Colonialism and its Aftermath'. During the next three years, the cluster held work-in-progress seminars to showcase the research of individual scholars, and it developed a number of collaborative research projects. Late in 2004, the University's Research College agreed that the cluster - which has brought in some 2 million dollars in research funding - should now become a Centre. For more about the Centre and its activities, go to http://colonial.arts.utas.edu.au/
Research Project/s