Women's Studies News
Semester One 2008
New Staff
We are very happy to welcome Dr Janine Burke as a new Monash Fellow (co-located in the School of English, Communications & Performance Studies). Janine is a renowned independent scholar, and author of many books of art criticism including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1995) and Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) .Janine recently convened the successful Inside the mind of Freud Exhibition.
On March 19, the Faculty will officially welcome Janine at an event at the MUMA Gallery. Her fellowship work will focus on artistic collabrations and will involve exhibitions locally and internationally.
Dr Sally Newman will join the Centre for Women’s Studies on a Teaching and Research Assistantship for Semester 1. Sally will teach into our Honours Unit Gender, Sexuality, Power and build our collaboration on-line with colleagues in Malaysia. Sally’s research work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality and Women's History Review.
Recent Activities and Achievments
The Centre 21st Commemorative Year was launched with a Public Lecture and Graduate Master Class delivered by Professor Robyn Wiegman from Duke University. This was a great event attended by many past staff and students of the Centre. See the event report here.
Suzanne Fraser received an ARC Discovery Grant (2008-2010) Under construction: the social and cultural politics of hepatitis C in Australia [with Associate Professor Carla Treloar & Associate Professor David Moore, UNSW]. Many congratulations, Suzanne.
Dr Ann Vickery, with Dr Margaret Henderson from the University of Queensland, successfully convened Manifesting Literary Feminisms: Drafts, Grafts, Nexus, and Faultlines at theMonash University City Campus in December.
Semester Two 2007
Recent Graduates
We are very pleased to congratulate Dr Jennifer Mitchell, Dr Myfawny McDonald and Dr Lousie Poland, all of whom received their doctorates in October 2007.Recent Staff Publications
Suzanne Fraser's report on methadone was published in November 2007 – Fraser, S., valentine, k., Treloar, C. & Macmillan, K. (2007). Methadone maintenance treatment in NSW and Victoria: Takeaways, diversion and other key issues. Monograph. Sydney: National Centre in HIV Social Research. Congratulations Suzanne.
Ann Vickery's book, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women's Poetry was published by Salt Publishing in August, 2007.
New Staff
We are very happy to welcome Dr Suzanne Fraser to the Centre. Suzanne comes to us from the University of New South Wales where she recently completed a three-year NHMRC funded project examining social and cultural aspects of methadone maintenance treatment.. Suzanne's research interests centre on the relationships between ideas of the body, gender, intoxication and compulsion, and bodily modification and enhancement. Her most recent research has used the work of Karen Barad, Judith Butler and John Law to examine political aspects of health and disease, including illicit drug use and hepatitis C prevention.
Dr Sharon Bickle has recently been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Centre for Women’s Studies. Sharon's research focuses on feminist and queer literary studies with a particular concern for women’s poetry; biography, autobiography and life-writing; the politics of the "gendered" archive; and scholarly editing. Central to this research are the pre-modern lesbian poets, “Michael Field.”Dr Bickle has recently received the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Humanities Travelling Fellowship (2007) to pursue her research in the United Kingdom in December and January.
Recent Thesis Submissions
Sally Newman recently submitted her thesis entitled Traces of Desire: Reading the Lesbian Archive. During her candidature, Sally won the Margaret Storrs Grierson Scholar-in-Residence Grant at Smith College, USA, and the Lady Leitch Fellowship from the Victorian branch of the Australian Federation of University Women (AFUW). Her work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality and Women's History Review.
Recent Activities and Achievments
Associate Professor Maryanne Dever has been awarded the Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar in Women's Studies at University of Ottawa for semester one 2008.
The Centre has just published a significant report by PhD graduate Ilsa Evans. Battlescars: Long term effects of prior domestic violence contains findings and recommendations based on Ilsa's PhD research.
Dr Ann Vickery, with Dr Margaret Henderson from the University of Queensland, is convening a feminist literary conference in December this year, titled Manifesting Literary Feminisms: Drafts, Grafts, Nexus, and Faultlines at the Monash University City Campus.
Semester One 2007
Recent Graduates
Dr Jennifer Mitchell received her doctorate in April 2007. Jennifer’s thesis, entitled Fictions of Becoming: Creativity and the Post-Domestic in the fictions of Drusilla Modjeska, Marion Halligan, Amanda Lohrey and Stephanie Dowrick focused on contemporary re-interpretations of domesticity in Australian women’s writing. Jennifer received the Faculty of Arts Publication Award to develop her thesis work for publication. Congratulations, Jennifer.
Recent Staff Publications
Ann Vickery’s book, Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women's Poetry is being published by Salt Publishing in August.
Ann has also recently published ‘The Rise of ‘Women’s Poetry’ in the 1970s: An Initial Survey into New Australian Poetry, the Women’s Movement, and a Matrix of Revolutions’, Australian Feminist Studies 22.53 (July 2007): 269-89
JaneMaree Maher has recently published ‘A Researcher on the Wrong Side of the Blanket? : Questions of Illegitimacy in Birth Research’, Resources for Feminist Research/ Documentation sur la recherche féministe 31 (3/4) (2007): 87-102; ‘Prone to Pregnancy: Orlando, Virginia Woolf and Sally Potter represent the gestating body’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 28(1) (2007): 19-30; and with Dr Lise Saugeres, ‘To Be or not to Be a Mother?: Women negotiating cultural representations of mothering’, Journal of Sociology 43(1) (2007): 5-21