The Honours Research Project
The Honours research project is an important part of the Honours programme. The project is undertaken over two semesters and provides an exciting opportunity for students to do extended research and writing on a topic of their choice under the supervision of a staff member with expertise in that field. The project will take the form of a research essay of 12,500 words or a creative writing or editing project of comparable scope. Students enrolled under the research project codes will also attend a short series of research methodology seminars to refine their research and presentation skills.
Students are advised to discuss possible areas of research with the Honours coordinator and other staff before completing their enrolment. When they submit their enrolment forms students must also nominate an area of study from the list of general research areas below and notify the Honours coordinator of their choice so that supervision arrangements can be made. A short project proposal must be submitted to the Honours coordinator by the end of week four of the student’s first semester of enrolment.
General research areas:
Contemporary fiction
Nineteenth-century fiction
Postcolonial studies
Screen studies
Shakespeare Studies
Renaissance Literature
Theatre studies
Science fiction
Human-animal studies
Representations of Antarctica
Medieval English Literature
Medievalism
Literature of Tasmania
Australian literary and cultural studies
Ecocriticism
Literary Theory
Creative writing
Travel writing
History of the book
Research interests of English staff and sample suggested topics:
Dr Victoria Burrows
Whiteness studies, feminist literature and theory, colonialism and sites of postcolonial resistance in literature and theory, and readings of trauma and shame and their literary applications
Dr Robert Clarke
Travel writing with a focus on Australian travel writing; contemporary Australian fiction, especially the treatment of the theme of reconciliation; literary celebrity; the relationships between and debates concerning the writing of history and fiction;
“celebrity colonialism”; and creative nonfiction.
Suggested topics:
- Celebrity within colonial and postcolonial cultures
- Aboriginality and Australian travel writing
- Australian literature and the discourses, politics, and ethics of Reconciliation
Prof Ralph Crane
Anglo-Indian fiction; Indian English fiction; the fiction of J.G. Farrell
Also: the theory and practise of Imperial Whiteness, New Zealand fiction
Suggested topics:
- Mixed Marriage in Maud Diver's Lilamani Quartet
- Revisiting the Indian Mutiny in J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishanpur
Dr Lisa Fletcher
Representations of gender and sexuality in popular fiction, literature and film; Island narratives (especially Mutiny on the Bounty); theory (especially feminist theory, queer theory, theories of performativity).
Suggested topics:
- New directions in popular romance fiction.
- The Mutiny on the Bounty on page &/or screen
- Judith Butler and critical heterosexuality studies
Dr Rose Gaby
Shakespeare on stage and screen; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; Tasmanian theatre history; Australian and open-air Shakespeares; Restoration and modern drama
Suggested topics:
- Hamlet in Hobart: a comparative study of selected productions from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
- From stage play to screenplay: adapting infidelity in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal and Patrick Marber’s Closer.
Dr Elizabeth Leane
Representations of Antarctica in literature, and the culture of Antarctic communities; the relationship between literature and science; science fiction
Suggested topics:
- Antarctica in Pulp Science Fiction Magazines
- Three Things: A Comparative Analysis of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (1938), Howard Hawks's Thing from Another World (1951), and John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)
- Female Transformation Narratives in Recent Antarctic Writing
(see Elle’s bibliography of Antarctic literature and film at http://www.utas.edu.au/english/Representations_of_Antarctica/)
Dr Philip Mead
Australian book history; innovative and experimental poetry and poetics; Tasmanian literature and culture; Australian Shakespeares
Suggested topics:
- Modernism's annus mirabilis (1922) in Australia
- Edward Kemp's A Voice from Tasmania (1846)
Dr Jenna Mead
Medieval English literature; feminist and critical theory; postcolonial literature and theory; cultural studies (film and popular fiction)
Dr Narelle Shaw
Contemporary Australian fiction, ecocriticism (Australian literature) and Australian satire
Suggested topics:
- Aesthetics in the technological age
- the pleasures of satire in the light of contemporary theory
Prof Helen Tiffin
Postcolonial studies; animal and environmental studies; Carribean writing
Dr Danielle Wood
Creative Writing
Recent Honours Projects
Copies of Honours Research Projects from previous years are held in the Morris Miller Library. Recent titles include:
- “Loosening the Bind: Reading Women in Charles E. Pearce’s Mutiny Fiction” (2004)
- “Who is Harry Potter?” (2003)
- “The Voice of the Translator: Textual Authority in the Boece” (2004)
- “Only a Trickle? Blood in Detail and Three Women’s Films” (2003)
- “Provincialising Postmodernism: Jameson and American Exceptionalism” (2004)
- “Ice Dreaming: Reading Whiteness in Kim Scott’s Benang” (2004)
- “‘Makeover my soul’: Emma and the Feminist Third Wave” (2004)
- “Disarming the Present: A Child’s Book of True Crime and the Australian Literary Imagination” (2003)
- “Chaucer, the Wife and Me …” (2004)
- “The Illusion of Space: Writing Cities and Reading their Monuments” (2003)
- “Writ(h)ing Out of Place: the Reel versus the Real in The Satanic Verses and White Teeth”(2003)
- “‘The Advancing Green Tide’: Silence and Nature in JG Farrell’s Troubles” (2005)
- “Visions of Earth, Seeds and the Language of the Ocean: Three Stories and an Exegesis” (2005)
- “Mutation is Great: Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation as Film Theory”(2005)
- “Men are from Mars: Gender and Representation in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard” (2005)
- “Celtic Macbeth: Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters as the triune goddess of Celtic mythology” (2005)
- “Reason, Dream and Dance: The Poetics of Wholeness in Les Murray’s Poems and Essays” (2005)
- “The Museum Cottage Fact and F(r)iction in Museological Space: Writing Possible Histories” (2006)
- “‘Words are very loud, if only you can use them’: The Loudness of Words in the Story of Ned Kelly” (2006)
- “Long Strange Ride: Fictocritical Movements in Landscape and Language" (2006)
- “The forest of Anykščiai and poe (trees) of place: forest in Lithuania and Tasmania” (2007)
- “The architexture of art and lies” (2007)
- “Over the horizon with Charles Sturt: space and narrative in the central Australian expedition 1844-1846” (2007)
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