Publications

Model Organisms

Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2021).

This book contends that model organisms are key components of distinctive ways of doing research. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding.

Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self

Katie Barclay. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2021).

Caritas, a form of divine grace that transformed neighbourly love into moral action, was a key concept in early modern Europe, guiding ideas about morality, the self, and becoming an embodied ethic. This book introduces the concept of an ‘emotional ethic’ to help explain the role of caritas in early modern communities, where love was not simply how one should feel about one’s neighbour but the ways that our bodies and emotions guide us to ethical action.

Claiming the City in South African Literature

Meg Samuelson. Abingdon & New York: Routledge (2021).

This book demonstrates the insights that literature brings to transdisciplinary urban studies, and particularly to the study of cities of the South. Focusing on how the South African city has been designed to funnel gold into the global economy and to service an enclaved minority, the study looks to the literary city to advance a contrary emphasis on community, conviviality and care.

In the Eye of the Storm: Volunteers and Australia’s Response to the HIV/AIDs Crisis

Robert Reynolds, Shirleene Robinson & Paul Sendziuk. Sydney: UNSW Press (2021).

For the first time, by focusing on individual life stories, this book explores the crucial role of the men and women who volunteered to help during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. Through their stories, drawn from oral histories conducted by the authors, we see how those on the front-line navigated and survived a devastating epidemic, and the long-term impact of those grim years of illness, death and loss.

Persona Studies: An Introduction

P. David Marshall, Christopher Moore, Kim Barbour. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell (2020).

Modern social media and communication technologies have reshaped our identities and transformed contemporary culture, revealing an expanded and intensified reforming of our collective online behaviour. This timely book helps readers navigate the changing cultural landscape while laying the groundwork for further research and application of persona studies.

Valerius Flaccus: Argonautica Book 7

Translated by Peter Davis. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2020).

This book is the first commentary on Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Book 7 in English, taking account of not only Anglophone, but also French, German, and Italian scholarship. It presents a new and detailed interpretation of a key moment in the transmission of one of the best known of classical myths.

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves

Natalie Edwards. New York: Routledge (2020).

This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. The book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative.

Revivalistics: From the Gensis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond.

Ghil’ad Zuckermann. New York: Oxford University Press (2020).

In this book, Ghil'ad Zuckermann introduces revivalistics, a new trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization, and reinvigoration. Applying lessons from the Hebrew revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary endangered languages, Zuckermann takes readers along a fascinating and multifaceted journey into language revival and provides new insights into language genesis.

Ethnic Media and Democracy: From Liberalism to Agonism.

John Budarick. Palgrave Macmillan (2019).

This book suggests a new way of examining the intersection between ethnic media, journalism and democracy. It provides the first in depth analysis of ethnic media and democratic theory and challenges established modes of thinking about the role of journalism in democratic societies.

Memory: a self-referential account.

Jorge Fernandez. New York: Oxford University Press (2019).

This book offers a philosophical account of memory. It proposes that memories have a particular functional role which involves past perceptual experiences and beliefs about the past and suggests that memories have a particular content as well; they represent themselves as having a certain causal origin.

Todd Solondz: Black humour and red ink in the career of the independent filmmaker.

Julian Murphet. Champaign: University of Illinois Press (2019).

Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur Todd Solondz. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz's themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz's uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters rejects any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema.

Indigenous rights and colonial subjecthood: protection and reform in the nineteenth-century British empire.

Amanda Nettelbeck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2019).

Amanda Nettelbeck explores how policies designed to protect the civil rights of indigenous peoples across the British Empire were entwined with reforming them as governable colonial subjects. Within this comparative frame, Nettelbeck traces how the imperative to protect indigenous rights represented more than an obligation to mitigate the impacts of colonialism and dispossession. It carried a far-reaching agenda of legal reform that arose from the need to manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane governance jostled with colonial growth.

Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors.

Anne Pender. Melbourne: Monash University Press (2019).

Anne Pender explores the lives and creative work of seven extraordinary performers who have brought joy and hilarity to generations of Australians through their memorable characters on stage and television, and in their potent satire, musical comedy, revue, drama, stand-up acts and one-person shows.

L’Auberge Espagnole: European Youth on Film.

Ben McCann. Oxford: Routledge (2018).

This book addresses the topic of Europe’s youth generation, paying particular attention to the ways in which the film L’Auberge espagnole (The Spanish Apartment) depicts the transition from adolescence to adulthood as allegory for the experiences of European society as it moves through periods of readjustment towards uncertain futures. It also examines the two sequels to the film – Russian Dolls (2005) and Chinese Puzzle (2013) – and how the complications faced by the main characters across the trilogy suggest that the move to adulthood is a never-ending process of growing up and reaching a level of self-actualization.

A History of South Australia.

Paul Sendziuk & Rob Foster. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. (2018).

A History of South Australia investigates South Australia's history from before the arrival of the first European maritime explorers to the present day, and examines its distinctive origins as a 'free' settlement. The first comprehensive, single-volume history of the state to be published in over fifty years, A History of South Australia is an essential and engaging contribution to our understanding of South Australia's past.