Dr Andrew Hassam
- BA (Hons.) (Wales), MA (East Anglia), PhD (Wales), FHEA
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Andrew Hassam was educated in the UK and received his PhD from the University of Wales (Cardiff) in 1984. In 1997, he founded the Australian Studies BA (Hons.) programme at the University of Wales, Lampeter, and between 2004 and 2007 he established the Master of Australian Studies programme at Monash University. He served on the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) benchmark group for Area Studies (2000–2002), was a member of the Advisory Board of the UK LTSN Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (2003–2004), and was Vice-President of the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) from to 2001 to 2008.
He has held a number of competitive international research Fellowships, including:
- Harold White Fellow, National Library of Australia, Canberra (1992)
- Australian Bicentennial Fellow, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (1993/4 and 2000/01)
- Wingate Scholar, The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, London (1994/95)
- C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow, Library Council of New South Wales (1995)
- Visiting Fellow, History Program, RSSS, the Australian National University (1998)
- Visiting Fellow, Queensland University of Technology (1999)
- Visiting Fellow, Humanities Research Centre, the Australian National University (2001 and 2002)
He is a member of the editorial boards of the Australian Humanities Review and History Compass (Wiley-Blackwell), and is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA).
Research Interests
As a British-born Australianist, my approach to the study of Australia has always been less concerned with national formation and more with Australia’s place within transnational networks. In the 1990s, I pursued research into the experiences of shipboard migrants from the UK to Australia, and then into the experiences of British Australians visiting the UK. The main outcome of this research was two monographs, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (1994) and Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain. (2000). I am currently writing a monograph on changing Australian attitudes to British migration between 1947 and 1977, ‘Whingeing Poms and Whining Aussies,’ based on research into the newspapers of the period, especially analysis of Letters to the Editor.
I first visited India in January 2005, and have since established two collaborative Australia–India research projects. For the first of these, we have set up a research team to investigate cultural and commercial exchange between Melbourne and Calcutta in the 1880s, and we held a symposium on the topic at the Victoria Memorial Building in Kolkata in February 2007. A volume of essays based on this symposium, Australia-India Transactions: From Empire to Globalisation, is being considered for publication. The second Australia–India collaboration is an interdisciplinary project on Bollywood in Australia. I co-convened a conference on the topic in Melbourne in November 2006 and I am currently editing a volume of essays for University of Western Australia Press, Bollywood in Australia: Transnationalism and Cultural Production, to be published later in 2008.
My remaining research interest at present is Australian Studies teaching internationally, and I led two collaborative projects that investigated the teaching, learning and assessment of Australian Studies in the UK. To my mind, the future of Australian Studies lies outside Australia, and this asks new questions about the place of the nation within the learning environment, a topic on which I have recently published in the Australian Journal of Education (2007).
Selected Publications
Monographs
Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993)
The diary format has long been utilised by novelists as a means of imparting reality to fiction. This volume analyses the forms of diary fiction employed by a range of British writers in the post-World War II period. It provides new commentaries on the work in this genre of major fiction writers such as William Golding, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, and Malcolm Lowry and introduces the work of a number of less familiar novelists like B. S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin, Emma Tennant, and Rayner Heppenstall. These writers all have used self-conscious diary fiction to explore the relationship between their writing and the reality it aims to represent. Writing and Reality outlines the ways in which such work as a whole challenges the dominant cultural values of contemporary Britain.
Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994)
Between 1788 and 1880, some 1.3 million free emigrants arrived in Australia from the British Isles, part of a mass migration from Europe without precedent in human history. Before the advent of photography, the surviving diaries offer snapshots of the lives and experiences of many ordinary men and women who embarked on this adventure. Yet the stories that emerge are as much to do with the process of life-writing as they are historical snapshots, and this study investigates how writing a diary helped diarists make sense of the momentous experience of migrating to Australia by sail in the later nineteenth-century.
Through Australian Eyes: Colonial Perceptions of Imperial Britain (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000)
In the last 25 years of the nineteenth century, around two hundred thousand visitors from Australia landed in Britain. As members of the colonial elite, they sailed to the Old Country to experience their Britishness: they toured Westminster Abbey; they visited graves of parents; they threw snowballs at Christmas. As one visitor expressed it on arrival in London in 1889: ‘Spotted St Pauls in the distance & felt at home.’ Using unpublished diaries and letters, this book offers a unique and cross-disciplinary approach to Cultural History. It considers both British and Australian national identities as the products of cultural displacement.
Edited Books
No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries 1852—1879 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995)
Eight distinctive and rare travel journals of nineteenth-century working people, written on the long sea journey from the Old World to the New, are reproduced here for the first time.
Australian Studies Now: An Introductory Reader (New Delhi: Indialog, 2007)
Australian Studies Now introduces to an Indian readership many of the best scholars writing on Australia today. Each essay engages with key debates relating to the society and culture of contemporary Australia, and through analysis of Australia’s literature and history, as well as its cinema, theatre, education, its sports and its many religions, Australian Studies Now provides insight into such major topics as Australian nationalism, multiculturalism and Aboriginal Australia.
Selected Recent Articles
‘How British are we?’ Meanjin 63.3 (2004): 123-30. Reprinted by Thomson in Contemporary Literary Criticism 245 (Dec. 2007).
‘From Heroes to Whingers: Changing Attitudes to British Migrants, 1947 to 1977.’ Australian Journal of Politics and History 51.1 (2005): 79-93.
‘Post-war Migration and the Birth of the Whingeing Pom.’ ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia 24 (2006): 29-55.
‘Speaking for Australia: Cross-cultural Dialogue and International Education.’ Australian Journal of Education 51.1 (2007): 72-83.
‘The “Bring out a Briton” Campaign of 1957 and British Migration to Australia in the 1950s.’ History Compass 5 (2007): 818-44.
‘“Songs and dance and dresses”: The International Popularity of Bollywood.’ Meanjin 66.2 (2007): 59-63.